Open Encyclopedia of Anthropology - Digital Worlds

Photography

Rebecca Tishler — Thu, 22 Dec 2022 00:48:03 +0000

Hanoi, Vietnam 2018. Young men line up for school pictures at the Temple of Literature. Photo: Brent Luvaas.

Drexel University

Initially published 22 Dec 2022

Abstract:

Human beings have never encountered as many photographs as we do today. They surround us in public spaces, and populate the numerous screens we access in our daily lives. Anthropologists are working to understand the social and cultural ramifications of this ubiquitous photography on societies throughout the globe. This entry examines the work anthropologists have done on, and with, photography. It surveys the conclusions anthropologists have reached about the social and cultural impacts of photography and discusses the multimodal experiments that define the use of photography in anthropology today. Photography, anthropologists argue, is never an impartial representation of the world around us. It is part and parcel of making the world what it is. It is an active medium through which human beings define and re-define themselves and their societies.

Introduction

Human beings have never encountered as many photographs as we do today. ‘Every two minutes’, writes media theorist Nicholas Mirzoeff, ‘Americans alone take more photographs than were made in the entire nineteenth century’ (2016, 4). In 2021, some 350 million photos were shared per day via the social media app Snapchat, another 350 million via Facebook, and around 95 million through Instagram. We see photographs in books, on billboards, in storefronts and on television screens, and nearly every time we pull our phones from our pockets, which for much of the world’s population is well over a hundred times per day.

Photography, then, is more and more pervasive in our daily lives. Anthropologists, along with other social scientists, are working to understand the implications of that pervasiveness. Photography, their research shows, is continually expanding its social utility, cultural salience, and political relevance. It has become a tool of power and persuasion (Sekula 1992; Edwards 2001; Azoulay 2008), of memory and connection (Wright 2013; Campbell 2014; Miyarrka Media 2019). It operates as a kind of language (Miller 2015; Jurgenson 2019) through which we communicate our moods and our thoughts, and a social currency through which we imagine, construct, and add value to our public identities (Abidin 2018).

This does not mean, however, that everyone everywhere uses photography in the same way. Anthropologists, through long-term, in-depth studies of specific communities in diverse regions around the globe, have uncovered a range of meanings and uses associated with photography. For some, photography is a tool for capturing reality ‘as it really is’: its indisputable objective nature (Edwards 1992), or its spiritual essence (MacDougall 1992). For others, photography is a medium for self-invention, a way of depicting what could or should be (Pinney 1998; Bajorek 2020). For still others, it is a method of deception, of distorting or manipulating reality, or of convincing others that reality is different than they had imagined it. In many cases, photography is all of these things at once (Strassler 2021).

Anthropology is not unique among the social sciences and humanities in giving photography this sort of critical attention. What sets it apart from other disciplines is its emphasis on lived experience. For anthropologists, photography is felt and embodied, not simply encountered or consumed. Photography is part of how we understand our selves and the world around us. As such, anthropologists often study photography by immersing themselves in other peoples’ photographic practices: experiencing, to the extent that it is possible, what it is like to consume and create photographs from the vantage point of one particular population at one particular moment in time. They also recognise the value of photography in communicating anthropological ideas and have been on the forefront of efforts to use photography to enhance, expand, and complicate social scientific work. In a world where the image is rapidly supplanting text as the primary means through which we communicate, we increasingly see photography as a rich alternative mode of anthropological representation.

This entry shows how photography has been both a subject and medium of anthropological work. It surveys many of the observations and conclusions anthropologists working among diverse populations have made about photography. It also explores experiments to use photography to document, communicate, and expand the audience of anthropological work.

Part 1: Photography as research subject

‘When writing about photography’, Rosalind Morris notes, ‘one often feels that almost everything has been said before’ (Morris 2009, 13). The same arguments and insights are recycled again and again. In part, this stems from the simple functionality of a camera. You press a shutter release button, and light passes through a lens. That light either leaves a physical trace on film or a plate through reacting with some sort of chemical agent (silver nitrate, most commonly) or is stored as data on a memory card. What could be more straightforward and easier to interpret than that?

The recycling of insights on photography also stems from the tendency of theorists of photography, including anthropologists, to cite a rather small, and predictable, body of theory in support of their work, with Susan Sontag’s On photography, Roland Barthes’ Camera lucida, and Walter Benjamin’s A short history of photography foremost among them. Photography, in this canon of thought, has specific, observable effects. The technology itself always, to some extent, determines the outcome. The medium is the message (McLuhan 1964). Photography acts as a mode of capture, reinforcing colonial conquest and the male gaze (Sontag 1976); it triggers reflections on death (Barthes 1981); and it opens pathways to the ‘optical unconscious’ (Benjamin 1931). Where anthropologists have complicated this canon of thought is in their insistence on placing acts of photographic production and consumption within particular cultural and historical contexts. For anthropologists, photography is always part of a larger assemblage. It is always ‘entangled’ in different social and political systems (Pinney 1997, 10). It cannot, then, be understood in isolation nor as a purely mechanical process with predetermined results.

Nonetheless, anthropologists too have often reiterated the same general arguments about photography, even if they word them differently. One of those arguments is that photography is never merely a way of representing the world around us; it is also itself a world-making practice, a means by which we transform the social, political, and material conditions of our lives. Photography, in other words, makes things imaginable and thinkable by changing the sensual apparatuses through which we encounter, understand, relate to, and act towards the things and beings around us. Photographs, anthropologist Terrence Wright explains, ‘intrude on, and become part of, everyday perception’ (Wright 1992, 28). ‘We do not simply “see” what is there before us’, elaborates Deborah Poole. ‘Rather, the specific ways in which we see (and represent) the world determine how we act upon the world and, in doing so, create what the world is’ (Poole 1997, 7).

Indeed, photography significantly impacts how anthropologists do, and think through, their own work. As is often noted , anthropology and photography developed in tandem as two mid-nineteenth century efforts to capture the elusive nature of the world around us (see Edwards 1992; Edwards 2001; Pinney 2011). Early anthropologists, just like early photographic innovators William Henry Fox Talbot and Louis-Jacques Mandé Daguerre, saw photography as a direct translation of what was out there ‘in the world’ onto a photographic plate. As such, photographs, for nineteenth century anthropologists, served as data or evidence of human cultural and morphological diversity. Photographs could chronicle the precise details of a subject with far greater precision than drawings or textual descriptions. Before ethnographic fieldwork was an established part of anthropological practice, anthropologists depended upon photographs from explorers and missionaries for key details about the populations they studied. Photography was the perfect medium for documenting dress, architecture, and artefacts. It also became a tool for documenting difference, a means by which European and American anthropologists visually reinforced their own peoples’ perceived superiority to others. In the most extreme form, this amounted to anatomical studies, where native populations were forced to stand naked before a grid, their bodily proportions and facial features subjected to the scrutinising gaze of ‘racial science’ (Edwards 2011; Pinney 2011). Here, photography was an instrument of colonialism, working side by side with an incipient anthropology to categorise and classify human beings around the world in ways that served the interests of European imperial powers.

By the early part of the twentieth century, however, anthropologists like Bronislaw Malinowski recognised the unique capacity of photography to present human populations with greater nuance and complexity ‘than any written commentary’ (Young 1998, 26) could. Though anthropology remained largely a discipline of words (Mead 1974), its ideas communicated through written articles and monographs, scholars like Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson, used photography to capture ‘the intangible relationships among different types of culturally standardized behavior’ (Bateson and Mead 1942, xii), or to ‘record visual impressions’ that could later be ‘carried into the laboratory for refined analysis’ (Collier 1957, 846). Photographs, after all, contain a superabundance of information. They capture errant and ‘quotidian details’ (Young 1998, 1) that often exceed the intentions of the persons who take them or who chose to include them within a text (Taylor 1996). Sometimes they even contradict the intentions of an anthropologist, revealing greater complexity than their own argument could allow. In such cases, photography is not merely a passive or neutral recorder of personal observations but rather exists alongside those observations, expanding upon and complicating them. In short, photography exerts a kind of agency over anthropological practice. It helps shape the field of anthropology rather than merely serving its ends.

Multiple forms of agency

Another argument that anthropologists make repeatedly is that photography does not just do things to us; we do things with it. Photography is always entangled with other kinds of agencies, other agendas, other social projects. It never simply serves one end. In the case of the colonial photography of early anthropology, for instance, the photographed also exerted some agency over the images produced. ‘Rather than seeing photography purely as a tool of the colonial project’, writes Jane Lydon, of her work on archival images of Aboriginal Australians, ‘a closer look at the production and consumption of the photographic images under scrutiny here reveals a dynamic and performative relationship between photographer and Aboriginal subject’ (Lydon 2005, xiii). While colonisers use photography to demonstrate their difference from the colonised, the colonised use photography to present a more complicated picture: of their own modernity and sophistication, their own syncretic and hybrid identity, their fluidity and continuity in the face of imperial powers. Photography does not just act upon colonial subjects: it can also act with them.

A similar point has been made about the Peruvian Andes. Anthropologist Deborah Poole argues that the ‘image world’ of the Andes, constructed through a range of photographs taken by colonists and others, shapes the world experienced by the people in the Andes themselves. However, it is never simply a top-down world imposed from on high by colonial powers. Image worlds instead are negotiated through millions of small acts of image-production, circulation, and curation, an ‘intricate and sometimes contradictory layering of relationships, attitudes, sentiments, and ambitions, through which European and Andean peoples have invested images with meaning and value’ (Poole 1997, 7-8). The meaning production connected with photography, in other words, is a continually unfinished process engaged in by multiple parties with different stakes in the outcome. Some of those parties may have disproportionate power to shape the meanings invested in photographs, but that doesn’t mean other parties have no power. The colonised too participate in meaning-making. They too help shape the image world photography constructs around us.

Recognising that photography can serve different ends in different contexts, anthropologists studying photography have committed themselves to looking beyond the Western world, chronicling the multiple, intertwined histories of the practice and displacing a Eurocentric perspective (Pinney 2003; Behrend 2013). In doing so, they again and again note the agentive practices of photographers and the subjects of their photographs. In the Indian city of Nagda, for instance, photography is employed for various projects of state and self-making (Pinney 1998). While the Indian government continues colonial-era practices of using photography to document, define, and track the whereabouts of its citizens, citizens themselves often use photography to thwart or undermine these ends. While the state invests in a ‘naturalist’ or ‘realist’ paradigm of photography, in which what is depicted is simply an accurate representation of what ‘is’, Indian citizens frequently use photography to project a kind of dream version of self and place, exploring the potential of photography to enact, through elaborate staging and post-production practices, particular kinds of fantasies and desires. Here, photography is more about imagination than representation.

The line between the two, however, is not always clear. In Mussoorie, a resort town in the foothills of the Himalayas, domestic Indian tourists dress themselves up as ‘idealized peasants, bandits, Arab sheiks, and pop stars’ (MacDougall 1992, 103) to get their portraits taken in photography studios. They do this, claims anthropologist and filmmaker David MacDougall, not simply to play act or mess around, but to represent a deeper, spiritual self, a self not necessarily visible to onlookers. Photography, here, becomes a form of self-actualisation, bringing the private self into alignment with the public self. MacDougall’s film on photographic practices in Mussoorie, Photo wallahs, allows us to observe this practice from multiple vantage points, itself demonstrating the irreducibility of visual (or audio-visual) content. In Chinese-owned photo studios in Dutch-colonial Java, similarly, customers got their photos taken before elaborate backdrops of foreign lands. These portraits, argues Karen Strassler, serve as ‘a form of virtual travel beyond the horizons of the everyday’ (2010, 77). Photography here is more about what ‘could be’ than what currently ‘is’. It works ‘to expand the horizons of the actual’ (Strassler 2010, 79).

Such photographic horizons are often inseparable from political ones. The people of Senegal, for instance, have used photography ‘both to document a time of radical social and political change and to effect these changes’ (Bajorek 2020, 5). Sometimes this takes on the seemingly innocuous form of the fantastical studio portraits described by Strassler, MacDougall, and Pinney, or as documented in Ghana by Tobias Wendl in his film Future remembrance (1998). Sometimes it depicts explicitly political events, like presidential rallies and protests. In either case, photography is not neutral. By representing themselves supported by crowds, politicians reinforce their power (Bajorek 2020). By documenting the masses drawn to their protests, movements of resistance gain momentum. Even studio portraits retain a certain transformative political potential. By depicting themselves as cosmopolitans and sophisticates, surrounded by consumer goods or in front of private jets, West African people work to transform their social and economic status (Bajorek 2020).

The political potential of photography, however, is not limited to what is depicted in images. What is left out, omitted, and censored also has importance, helping shape social and political realities. In Kenya, Heike Behrend argues, choosing not to depict oneself, or appearing only in veiled or altered form, has taken on a deep political significance for the Islamic minority (2013). The Kenyan government, like nearly all governments in the contemporary world, makes heavy use of photography in surveilling and accounting for its population. Official identification headshots, required for state-issued IDs and other bureaucratic endeavours, are one example. Kenyan Muslim women, who often choose to veil for both religious and personal reasons, are frequently required to remove their veils for official photographs, subjecting them to the scrutinising eyes of the state. It should come as little surprise, then, that many Kenyan Muslims are suspicious of being photographed, whether for state purposes, advertisements, or tourist images. Behrend refers to the efforts of Kenyan Muslims to go without photographic depiction, and to conceal, mask, and disguise their images when they do appear in photographs, as ‘the aesthetics of withdrawal’ (Behrend 2013, 20).

After all, once our images are ‘out there’, circulating by hand or through media, they are often outside of our control. They take on a life of their own when they are defaced, reproduced, or taken out of context, for example. They can generate parody images, be cut and pasted into collages and montages, or become street art or Internet memes. Karen Strassler, discussing the tendency of images to multiply and circulate in the media environment of contemporary Indonesia, refers to occurrences where photographs get mixed up in larger public debates and political discourses as ‘image-events’ (Strassler 2021). An image-event, she writes,

is a political process that crystallizes otherwise inchoate and dispersed imaginings within a discrete and mobile visible form that becomes available for scrutiny, debate, and play as it circulates in public (Strassler 2021, 13).

Image-events can take many forms: a picture of a celebrity in a men’s magazine that may or may not be nude, an image of a killed political activist photocopied and pasted onto walls, a caught-in-the-act shot of a politician engaging in unseemly or outright illegal behaviour. Photographs get intertwined with larger social processes, a fact, claims Strassler, that should lead us to abandon the conception of photographs as static depictions of particular moments. It may be worthwhile to think of ‘all images as “events” of varying intensity, duration, and scale’ (Strassler 2021, 13).

Photography’s multiple meanings

That does not mean that images are fully available to the academic gaze, or that we can come to any complete understanding of what a photograph does or means as it circulates in public. Photographs retain something of a stubborn opacity. Images in colonial-era Java, claims John Pemberton, reveal ‘unintended traces of a ghostliness within the machinery of the modern’ (Pemberton 2009, 49). There are presences within images that can’t always be accounted for, details that fail to conform to our understanding of events. What is that shadow in the corner of the image, that smirk creeping up the side of a face? Photographs don’t only show us what we want them to show but they can also reveal elements otherwise hidden and contradictions not easily contained.

Photography can move through different modes and functions even within a single cultural context. In his study of photographic practices in the Roviana Lagoon of the western Solomon Islands, Christopher Wright describes the ‘entanglement’ of Roviana people with photography in various ways: ‘through being the subjects of colonial photography, through their own uses and expectations of the medium, and through the role photography can play in their ideas of history’ (Wright 2013, 2). In Roviana, as in Nagda or Java, there is no single, simple explanation of what photography is or does. There are only singular instances in which the Roviana use photography towards various ends. Roviana people are both the subjects and objects of photography. While colonists used photography to capture and categorise the Roviana, the Roviana used photography to tell their own oral histories, forge their own understanding of the past, and even to re-imagine, and rework, the colonial encounter.

Given photography’s frequently multiple meanings, the conclusions anthropologists reach about a particular body of photography are not necessarily shared by their interlocutors. In his work on the interpretation of colonial-era photography in The Gambia, Liam Buckley shows how citizens of postcolonial countries often interpret photographs in ways that are unpredictable, sometimes even contrary to the political and theoretical ends of the anthropologist herself (Buckley 2014). Gambians, he explains, denied him the sorts of ‘subaltern narratives’ he was hoping for in their interpretations of colonial photographs, focusing instead on aesthetic details: their age, their flatness, their amateurishness (Buckley 2014, 721). In essence, they rendered them largely meaningless, incapable of inflicting the kind of social or psychological harm anthropologists, and other experts, might imagine of them.

The same can be said of Yolngu practices of smart phone photography in contemporary Australia. As anthropologist Jennifer Deger has written in her collaborative account of the practice, ‘my Yolngu friends and family use mobile phones as a technology with which to tap into—and amplify—the push and pull of life’ (Miyarrka Media 2019, 9). Through fancifully edited photographs, mobile-phone-wielding Yolngu people use photography to connect with each other, their sense of identity, and their memories of past events. Photography doesn’t impose a singular view on Yolngu people. It gets mixed up in larger Yolngu projects of individual and collective becoming, projects that will never be finished.

‘All photographs’, writes Craig Campbell ‘are actually agitating; even the most mundane and seemingly transparent images…have the capacity to agitate against or undo our meaning making endeavors’ (2014, xiv). The inherent indeterminacy and instability of photographic meaning enables different populations to interpret photographs differently, employing them towards diverse, and often explicitly political, ends. Even photographic archives, Campbell shows, retain a dynamic capability, continually repurposed and reimagined for the concerns of the present. During the Soviet era, for instance, Russian communists used images of Indigenous Siberians to cast them as part of a larger national narrative, in which a continuity existed between Indigenous social structures and experiments in communist utopia. Today, Indigenous Siberians, and anthropologists like Campbell, use the same images to find gaps in this narrative, and to tell a messier, more complicated story about Indigenous survival under colonisation. Once again, as Strassler (2021) argues, not even still photographs are static.

A useful way to make sense of this semantic multiplicity of photographs is to ask how they appear and circulate in particular ‘visual economies’ (Poole 1997). Some participants in this economy will have more influence than others on how an image will be received and understood, as well as the kinds of stories it will be made to tell. One such disproportionate power resides with those that Zeynep Devrim Gürsel refers to as ‘image brokers’, the photography commissioners and editors for newspapers, websites, and other media resources where we encounter photographs. Image brokers choose which images to include with articles, and which images to use to illustrate a particular point, to represent a particular people or place, or to break up the text in visually arresting ways. ‘Image brokers’, writes Gürsel, ‘act as intermediaries for images through acts such as commissioning, evaluating, licensing, selling, editing, and negotiating’ (2016, 2). Their power, of course, is not unlimited. They too are subject to significant constraints: the authority of editors and advertisers, the perceived interests of their readership, and the fluctuations of the news market. Nonetheless, image brokers play a significant role in determining how audiences see and perceive the world around them. ‘Professional image making’, writes Gürsel, echoing by now a familiar sentiment, ‘is central to processes of worldmaking’ (2016, 13), as it shapes how we understand and act towards the world around us. Americans learn to regard other countries in particular ways in large part due to how they perceive them based on the images of them they have encountered. How would Americans conceive of Russia, Afghanistan, or other countries distant from them without the work of image brokers operating behind the scenes? Image brokers, then, hold an enormous sway over American, or any other, foreign policy. They are one set of power players in world politics who go largely unnoticed, their work too often mistaken for reality as it is.

While anthropologists have spent considerable energy uncovering the political potential and limitations of photography, it is important to note that not all photography is political in any explicit sense. In his open-access publication on uses of photography on social media apps like SnapChat and Instagram, Daniel Miller claims that photography is employed for all sorts of quotidian tasks. In these tasks, it operates like a language, expressing any variety of ephemeral moods and thoughts in ways not meant to have a lasting impact or be taken in an overly serious manner (Miller 2015). Nathan Jurgenson (2019) refers to this as photography’s ‘phatic’ function. Photography can be said to be functioning in a ‘phatic’ manner when it serves to create or maintain social connection, rather than communicate something meaningful.

Singaporean social media influencers may similarly reject many of the high and mighty purposes academics might want young people online to engage in through online photography (Abidin 2016). Photography on social media, instead, is for making silly faces in acts of self-deprecation, for amusing oneself and one’s friends, for expressing opinions without having to take the time to compose one’s thoughts into words (Miller 2015). Crystal Abidin describes this variety of phatic photography as ‘subversive frivolity’ (2016). In any case, with most photos now taken on smart phones, photography, Miller claims, has been thoroughly democratised. It is no longer the domain of elite image-makers. It is a medium for all of us, and as we make use of photography in more and more domains of our lives, we are continually expanding the boundaries of what photography can say and do.

Part 2: Photography as research medium

It should come as no surprise, then, that anthropologists are exploring what photography can say and do within their own work. Where previous generations of anthropologists used photographs largely to illustrate or support points made through text (Taylor 1996, 66; Strassler 2021, 27), anthropologists today are increasingly exploring ways to make photographs speak alongside their texts, telling a different, more open-ended, kind of story in a uniquely visual language.

One thing photography is understood to do is provide a medium through which diverse vantage points can be expressed. In photography, what is in the frame and outside of it, in focus and out, determines what we see and how. What we see is not the whole truth, but the selective and edited truth of one person, occupying one position at one moment in time. Recognising this feature of photography and looking to include their interlocutors as active participants in the production of knowledge, anthropologists have frequently provided cameras and other tools of visual representation to their interlocutors to do with as they will. To chronicle their harrowing journey across the Sonoran desert, for instance, Jason DeLeon (2015) supplied undocumented migrants with disposable cameras. To gain inside access into what it feels like for Somali refugees to await asylum in Delhi, India, Ethiraj Gabriel Dattatreyan (2015) gave cameras to the young men with whom he was shooting a documentary film. The method, known as ‘photovoice’, purports to give the marginalised, and often unrepresented, a ‘voice’ to depict themselves. It is often part of a larger project of ‘decolonising’ anthropology, challenging the power relationships that have constituted, in fact that continue to constitute, the discipline. Yet typically it is the anthropologist who selects from among the photos taken for inclusion within their work, and it is the anthropologist who provides context and interpretation for them. ‘Although these projects push against imbalances of power inherent in the act of photographic representation’, writes Alexander Fattal of photovoice, ‘echoes of those very imbalances inevitably resound in their implementation’ (2020, 153). Nonetheless, photovoice projects, like Fattal’s own among youth in drug-war-torn Colombia, can provide moving, evocative, and unsettling representations from outside the academy.

It remains to be seen, however, whether the interventions of photovoice will retain their relevance in the era of near-ubiquitous photography. ‘These days’, writes Paul Gurrumuruwuy as part of the Miyarrka Media collective, ‘every Yolngu has a phone’ (Miyarrka Media 2019, 1), and nearly every phone has a camera. Photographs are more present in the lives of the people anthropologists study than they ever have been. They are also more prosaic. There are, of course, still people in the world without regular access to cameras, such as the youth Fattal worked with, but their numbers are diminishing quickly, and with numerous social media platforms at their disposal, their dependence on anthropologists to present their work is less pronounced. The idea that anthropologists might play some crucial, interventionist role in providing their interlocutors with a means of documenting their own lives seems increasingly outdated. In most cases, anthropologists are simply not needed for that. Instead, liberated from a sort of salvage visual anthropology, they are exploring other, more experimental roles photography might play within their work.

‘The way to restore photography to a concrete contribution within the discipline’, wrote Elizabeth Edwards at the beginning of the digital era, ‘is to harness those qualities peculiar to the medium of still photography’ (1997, 53). Those qualities, she explains, are the open-endedness of photography, its inherent ambiguity, its incompleteness, and its inability to include everything within a frame. These are attributes that can be harnessed towards ethnographic ends, made to evoke rather than illustrate, and present non-reductive, multidimensional representations that enable us to ‘see through different eyes from beyond the Boundary’ (Edwards 1997, 54) that separates one cultural world from another. Anthropologists in the last two decades have found diverse ways to do just that.

Seeking to capture the affective landscape of a Brazilian sanatorium, Joao Biehl, for his book Vita: Life in a zone of social abandonment (2005), partnered with photographer Torben Eskerod. The resulting black and white images are less illustrative than evocative, immersing readers in the feeling of the place, rather than revealing details or reinforcing arguments. The images here work alongside the text, neither one subordinate to the other. The same is true in Righteous dopefiend (2009), an emotionally wrenching depiction of life on the streets of San Francisco for unhoused heroin addicts that Philippe Bourgois wrote in partnership with photographer, and then anthropological graduate student, Jeff Schoenberg. The book’s images provide emotional texture in addition to expository information, doing different, but no less important, work than the text.

The epistemic and emotional work that photography does depends on its ability to capture, without explicit commentary, a viewpoint that is both expansive and particular. To harness that dual potential, anthropologist Filip De Boeck partnered with photographer Marie-Françoise Plissart, and later Sammy Baloji, for the books Kinshasa: Tales of the invisible city (2004) and Suturing the city: Living together in Congo’s urban worlds (2016). Both books attempt to depict the irreducible complexities and contradictions of life in a contemporary Congolese city. Here too, the images add another dimension to the work. Rather than being a mere visual accompaniment, they make their own sort of ‘sensory argument’. The visual depicts what words cannot: a city lived and experienced, rather than theorised or explained.

While some anthropologists have partnered with photographers to create a more immersive sensory component to their work, others have taken their own photographs and made them central to the act of ethnographic communication. Throughout his book Monrovia modern: Urban form and political imagination in Liberia (2017), former photojournalist Danny Hoffman employs full-colour photographs to show how Monrovians inhabit, manipulate, and move through the deteriorating built environment of their city. Shot with wide lenses and available light, with human subjects often blurred or as tiny figures in the background, the images are both architectural and emotive, capturing something of the lived feeling of making do with a collapsing infrastructure and crumbling economy. Kevin Lewis O’Neill and Benjamin Fogarty-Valenzuela’s co-authored book Art of captivity (2020) also uses photography to demonstrate the way people occupy and make use of space. Focusing their lenses on Pentecostal drug rehabilitation centres in Guatemala, their richly coloured photographs of small, dank spaces capture the claustrophobia of captivity, human figures collapsed like plastic tarps in the corner of their cells. For both Hoffman, and O’Neill and Fogarty-Valenzuela, photography is a tool for depicting affect, those pre-articulate moods and sensations that animate the atmospheres around us (see Seigworth and Gregg 2010), even when we are unable to define what they are or mean. Their photos are complex and ambiguous, opening up multiple interpretations rather than presenting a specific argument. Borrowing from a street photography tradition that emphasises the ambiguity, complexity, and irreducibility of the image, my own photo-ethnographic essays on the streets of Indonesia (Luvaas 2022) and in the confines of my own home during the coronavirus pandemic (Luvaas 2021) mimic the opacity of lived experience, and expose the inability of theory to account for the complexity and multidimensionality of everyday life. It is up to us, Thera Majaaland (2017) explains in regards to her own photographic work that shows the facades of houses in Denmark, South Africa, and elsewhere, to fill in the gaps of what is not shown in an image. Photographic images tend to provide no closure.

In enabling such open-ended modes of representation, photography has become one part of a larger move towards what have been called ‘multimodal anthropologies’, a range of experiments in non-textual, or at least more-than-textual, sensory media with the intention of expanding the parameters of what counts as anthropological work and who is included within its practice (Collins, Durington and Gill 2017). Here, photography can be used as a way of collaborating with the natural environment, for example, whether by literally using plants to make images (developing film with stinging nettle or mashed up rose) or re-creating archival photographs of national parks in order to come to a better understanding of how those spaces have changed over time (Smith 2007). Even researchers’ family photographs have been used for both personal and political analyses, demonstrating, for example, how the ‘entanglement of subject and nation formation emerges in the images that comprise [a] family’s archive’ (Dattatreyan 2018).

Multimodality of this sort is understood as a way of interrogating existing power relationships within anthropology and its representations, even if it is not able to overcome them entirely. While ‘there is nothing inherently liberatory about multimodal approaches in anthropology’, they can nonetheless help us attend to ‘that unsettled feeling that we get in our gut’ that something in our practice is reinforcing power differentials (Takaragawa et al. 2019, 520). Multimodal forms of research and representation can help open up potential avenues to make anthropology more inclusive, more expansive, and more subversive of dominant narratives. While photography has been and continues to be a tool of domination and control, it also continues to be a tool, however imperfect, for participating in and supporting social justice movements, allowing us to work ‘as politically engaged makers and scholars’ (Alvarez Astacio, Dattatreyan, and Shankar 2021, 426).

Conclusion

Photography has never been a passive medium, a simple capturing of light that reflects a complete picture of what is ‘out there’ in the ‘real world’. It is, and has always been, a series of choices, made by situated social subjects under particular conditions of power, about how to depict their world and how to use those depictions to make substantive changes to it. People use photography to gain knowledge and mastery over their environments and the people around them. They use photography to push back against accepted social realities, to re-invent themselves and transform their social identities. They also use photography to just have fun, playfully reinterpreting their lives in ways that may read as frivolous or superficial to outside observers.

Studying the uses of photography by different populations in specific places and specific moments in time, anthropologists have long taken photography seriously, not just as a popular practice, but also as a social and political project with real-world consequences. Photography, anthropologists’ work shows, reframes and reshapes reality as we understand and experience it. It is a practice of world-making, not just world-representing. Moreover, it is a practice that different populations around the world use differently, for their own personal and political ends. Photography thus always has to be understood within a specific social, historical, and political context.

This does not mean, however, that photography is always available for understanding. If we recognise the inherent ambiguity of photographs, we become attuned to the fact that they depict more than what their producers purport them to show. Instead, they provide a complex, contradictory, and irreducible vantage point on reality. Anthropologists increasingly recognise this aspect of photography to be an asset in their own work, and they are exploring ways to use photography to create a more open-ended, inclusive, and collaborative vision of their discipline.

References

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Note on contributor

Brent Luvaas is Associate Professor of Global Studies at Drexel University. A visual anthropologist and avid photographer, his work explores how digital technologies shape the way we see and experience the world around us. He is the author of Street style: An ethnography of fashion blogging (2016, Bloomsbury) and DIY style: Fashion, music, and global digital cultures (2012, Berg).

Brent Luvaas, Drexel University, 3141 Chestnut St, Philadelphia, PA, 19104, US. luvaas@drexel.edu

Prefigurative politics

Rebecca Tishler — Fri, 18 Mar 2022 16:51:10 +0000

Guilherme Fians

University of St Andrews

Initially published 18 Mar 2022

http://doi.org/10.29164/22prefigpolitics

Abstract:

‘Prefigurative politics’ refers to how activists embody and enact, within their activism, the socialities and practices they foster for broader society. Inspired by anarchist principles, the core practices characterising prefiguration include participative democracy, horizontality, inclusiveness, and direct action. Gaining visibility with the social movements that blossomed after 1968, and again with the post-1999 movements opposing neoliberal globalisation, prefigurative politics involve deploying political practices that are in line with the activists’ envisaged goals. These, in turn, tend to encompass the construction of a democratic and horizontal society, which must be enacted through egalitarian relationships between activists who refrain from resorting to authoritarian, sexist, and exclusionary means to reach political goals. Yet, what are the origins of this concept? What kind of politics are referred to as prefigurative? Since the concept’s consolidation, anthropologists have been at the forefront of answering these questions, as both researchers and activists. They look at how prefigurative politics intersect with themes dear to the discipline, such as social organisation, globalisation, social change, community-building, and everyday ways of inhabiting the world. This entry explores how prefigurative politics as a concept and as a series of practices have become relevant among those who build horizontal political and social relations, oppose representative democracy, and embody alternative lifestyles. Exploring prefigurative politics leads scholars to question the seemingly straightforward divide between the New Left and ‘old lefts’. Additionally, asking whether right-wing movements can also engage in prefigurative politics helps us better understand the pervasive practices that transform non-institutionalised activism into laboratories from where people foster change and experiment with new socialities.

Introduction

Prefigurative politics—and its cognate, prefiguration—is one of those concepts that appear to be rather abstruse, but whose meaning actually indicates something ordinary. It refers to the strategies and practices employed by political activists to build alternative futures in the present and to effect political change by not reproducing the social structures that activists oppose. Prefiguration has been widely associated with the modus operandi of the social movements that blossomed after the 1960s, drawing on anarchist-inspired principles, such as participative democracy, horizontality, inclusiveness, and direct action. Via the motto ‘another world is possible’, prefiguration is often part of activist-led social experiments that, rather than serving clearly established goals, create open-ended ways of reimagining society and contesting the entanglements of representative democracy, neoliberalism, social inequality, and globalisation.

Yet, before prefiguration gained prominence with the last decades’ protests against neoliberal globalisation, how did this concept come into being? First used centuries ago to betoken a form of Christian salvation, how did prefiguration acquire a different meaning among political activists? What kind of politics is referred to as prefigurative?

The 1960s witnessed the emergence of the so-called ‘new social movements’ and the ‘New Left’. These constituted movements that amplified causes which spoke not only to economic and class-related goals, but also to civil rights, ethics, and alternative ways of inhabiting the world. Such causes include feminism, environmentalism, the movements for gay rights, animal rights, the American civil rights and other anti-racism movements worldwide, students’ movements and, since the 1990s, alterglobalisation movements (against neoliberal globalisation). Questioning Marxist and social-democratic forms of political action, the prefigurative forms of activism at the heart of these movements do not necessarily seek to mobilise every means available to achieve a pre-established, future-oriented goal. Instead, they aim to create a more egalitarian and inclusive society by equalling a movement’s means with a movement’s ends: reaching a horizontal society requires building horizontal relationships between activists in the present, which will, in turn, prefigure the envisaged end.

Such movements and tactics were labelled ‘new’ when measured against the paradigmatic ‘old’ of institutionalised activism carried out by political parties and trade unions since at least the Industrial Revolution. Thinking about political activism from the perspective of grand narratives and ideologies—as well as of communist theories of comprehensive social change—has stimulated social scientists to regard the success of a given mobilisation as dependent upon the attainment of certain predetermined goals (Maeckelbergh 2011), such as a revolution that will dismantle capitalism and implement a new mode of production. Yet, seeking a revolution as the ultimate goal often assumes that any means are valid to reach a more egalitarian and classless society. Unlike this paradigm, prefigurative politics refrain, for instance, from using authoritarianism to build a democratic society.

Anthropology has shown a long-standing interest in prefigurative politics since this concept’s first links with social movements. Mostly through the work of anthropologists-cum-activists, prefiguration has been approached alongside themes dear to the discipline, such as social organisation, globalisation, inequality, social change, community-building, and the ways in which everyday lives are lived. While political scientists and sociologists have mostly concentrated on political strategies by drawing parallels between several cognate social movements, anthropologists have employed participant observation to explore particular movements, collectives, and networks. In such manner, they have produced a nuanced understanding of how prefiguration takes place on the ground—without losing sight of its shortcomings.

Due to ethnographers’ particular attention to prefigurative politics in Europe and the United States, the existing body of literature may convey the idea that prefiguration thrives particularly in the Global North. Existing analyses have also tended to focus on disruptive, contentious politics. By contrast, fewer studies stress the pertinence of prefigurative practices in the everyday lives of people in the Global South, and of those who are not full-time protesters. Even fewer have considered how right-wing activists also mobilise prefiguration. While scholars generally agree on what constitutes prefigurative politics, some highlight an apparent paradox when the anarchist-inspired principles underlying prefiguration are mobilised by activists who are, content-wise, anything but anarchists. Other scholars, in turn, accentuate prefiguration as a political strategy that can be similarly deployed by activists advancing progressive as much as conservative content. Lastly, as I will discuss, several researchers have used prefiguration as a rather problematic umbrella term to label which movements and forms of activism have a prefigurative character and which ones have not.

To explore the historical and current significance of prefigurative politics, as well as its limitations, this entry analyses how this concept and the practices it designates have come to bear relevance among those who oppose representative democracy, build small-scale politically organised entities as horizontal micropolities, and embody alternative lifestyles. Questioning the seeming straightforwardness of the divide between the new and old lefts and bringing right-wing movements to the discussion, this entry provides anthropologists and non-academics with a gateway to better understand the pervasive practices that aim to turn activism into laboratories from where people foster change by experimenting with new socialities.

Revolutions that dismiss the revolution

The concept of prefiguration is often credited to Carl Boggs (1977) to describe the logics and practices of left-wing movements that, mostly since the 1960s, opposed Leninism and the working-class politics aimed at structural reform. Yet, little did Boggs know that the term had been previously used by Augustine in the 4^th century BCE to explain a key tenet of Christianity. Examining the fall of lust-laden Rome, Augustine ([1470] 1998) pointed out that, to enjoy spiritual salvation and avoid collective perishing, people should resign their paganism and commit to charity and moral integrity. Only by prefiguring a divine beatitude could one near a state of holiness to be partially enjoyed in the present and fully realised in the future (Scholl 2016, 321; Buts 2019, 17).

Whereas Augustine heralded spiritual salvation via the earthly enactment of God’s conduct, centuries later, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels ([1848] 2015) would call for political salvation via overthrowing the bourgeoisie and bringing an end to class struggle. Moving away from prefiguration, the Communist manifesto (1848) urged proletarians to fight the monopoly of the means of production held by the few, in a form of political salvation that ousts reformisms and entails revolutionary macropolitical changes. Toppling all existing social conditions, according to Marx and Engels, makes the revolution the means to reach the ultimate end of inaugurating a communist, classless society. Yet, means and ends frequently clashed here: major streams of Marxism ended up reproducing the authoritarian state power and highly bureaucratic hierarchies characteristic of bourgeois society (Boggs 1977, 5). Thus, Marx’s anti-statist theories often gained materiality via statist practices.

Contrasting with such statist orientations, the late 1960s and early 1970s saw the emergence of a new wave of radical politics. With the May 1968 uprisings in France and the civil rights movements in the US as their core symbols, the new social movements and New Left (Epstein 1991; Polletta 2002) reinforced the centrality of collective identity, civil rights, and lifestyles in activist agendas. In the French case, the emergence of youth mobilisations—initially associated with the fight against university funding policies—promptly gained the support of broader society. Via street barricades, occupation of universities, and France’s largest wildcat strikes, protesters—factory workers, students, and feminists, among others—built a communal agenda without having much in common. This implied replacing each group’s specific claims with broader demands, thus turning May 1968 into an open-ended experiment of society-building. Through grassroots practices collectively decided and enacted on the go, May 1968 had a long-lasting effect, enabling environmentalist, anti-fascist, and feminist perspectives to enter into the mainstream.

Meanwhile, Italian autonomism was gaining ground since the 1950s. Starting on factories’ shop floors, the worker’s autonomy movement (Autonomia Operaia) in Italy came to involve university students, women, artists, migrants, and other subaltern groups not traditionally conceived as ‘proletarian’ (Katsiaficas 2006). While occupying factories, universities, and abandoned buildings, autonomists sought to enact self-management and carry out everyday, small-scale revolutions by circumventing representative decision-making bodies (such as corporate boards, trade unions, governmental ministries, and political parties). On the other side of the Atlantic, the anti-Vietnam War demonstrations in the US succeeded in connecting students and workers, Black Panthers and pacifists, upper-middle-class white people, feminists, church organisations, anti-nuclear activists, and war veterans. Initially an uprising against warmongering, this coalition orchestrated a display of generalised political dissatisfaction despite not having a single, unifying agenda.

Operating outside the institutional frameworks of the state, political parties, and trade unions, these new social movements took shape through autonomous activists who organised in a mostly non-hierarchical, network-like manner. They sought to break with hierarchical and institutionalised politics in two main ways. Firstly, they expanded the scope of politics by bringing to the table previously marginalised political agendas. Mobilising prefiguration as an activist strategy, the New Left underscored issues from feminism and structural racism to drug policy reforms and environmental issues. Conservative activists equally deployed prefiguration to increase the relevance of anti-abortion and anti-drug advocacy. Secondly, the new social movements gave visibility to principles according to which the political means to achieve an end had to be consistent with that end. To build a more democratic and egalitarian society, one had to deploy democratic and egalitarian forms of grassroots activism. Likewise, building a white supremacist society means enacting ‘racially pure’ small-scale communities (Futrell and Simi 2004). Such uses of the concept have brought prefiguration to the core of post-1960s social movements’ political repertoire (Boggs 1977; Calhoun 1993).

Despite the diversity of prefigurative practices and the fact that the movements analysed here do not constitute a homogeneous whole, these practices tend to have in common ‘the embodiment, within the ongoing political practise of a movement, of those forms of social relations, decision-making, culture, and human experience that are the ultimate goal’ (Boggs 1977, 6-7). Hence, prefiguration is a way for activists to anticipate the changes they seek. And while everyday micropolitical action may not trigger a revolution or herald political salvation, it may progressively transform our ways of thinking, behaving, and imagining what society should be like.

An activist and anthropological field of action take shape

After its surge in the 1960s, prefigurative politics gained new momentum in the 1990s. With the dissolution of the USSR, social movements had to reinvent themselves beyond statism and rethink the capitalism versus communism divide. The 1994 Zapatista uprising in Mexico, for instance, gathered peasants, indigenous peoples, and marginalised urban groups in protest against the neoliberalism imposed by the Mexican state’s land reforms and the implementation of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). However, the Zapatistas did not address the government or political parties in their political demands: they fought for autonomy to implement by themselves the local-level changes they envisaged (Stahler-Stolk 2010). Ultimately, the Zapatistas managed to establish autonomous zones in the Mexican state of Chiapas, with local communities having more say in shaping state policies and school curricula. Twenty-four years on, in 2018, the Zapatistas put forward Marichuy, an indigenous woman, to run for the presidency of Mexico. Aware of the unlikelihood of her victory, the Zapatistas aimed to use the presidential elections to highlight to the subalterns at the margins of Mexican society that their reality can be changed for the better, especially outside the framework of institutionalised, representative politics (Ansotegui 2018). Prefiguring alternatives to market-controlled globalisation and state politics since 1994, the Zapatista uprising inspired movements that would increasingly tackle global issues.

Prefigurative politics gained even wider visibility with a movement that placed neoliberal globalisation as its nemesis: the 1999 protests in Seattle against the austerity, deregulation, and large-scale privatisation measures laid down by the Washington Consensus and advanced by international bodies such as the World Trade Organization (WTO). Following months of planning, the activists and collectives loosely gathered under the Direct Action Network formed a human barricade around the venue hosting the WTO ministerial conference. Contrasting with the WTO’s hierarchies and formalities, protesters wore costumes, danced, carried placards, and chanted anti-capitalist slogans, followed by marching bands performing in the blocked streets. Violence was also present, coming from police repression and from some protesters’ tactics of fighting neoliberalism by damaging institutional buildings, banks, and multinational corporations. Such lack of a consensus between partisans of violent and non-violent forms of direct action evinces the inherent diversity of activist tactics subsumed under the label ‘prefiguration’.

While the protesters prevented the WTO delegates from reaching the conference venue, activist crowds turned into a commons—a free space where people developed, at least for a limited number of days, an alternative sphere of social (re)production involving care, education, food, and housing (Varvarousis, Asara and Akbulut 2021). Through general assemblies, workshops, and encampments, they sought to prefigure locally the kind of relationships they envisaged for the world. In bonding with each other through solidarity, informality, horizontality, and inclusiveness, the activists sought to oppose, through their practices, the formality, authoritarianism, and exclusionary character of neoliberal organisations. The commons also created opportunities for radical learning: in a dialogical process of horizontal education (Backer et al. 2017), activists co-produced knowledge, learned from each other’s prior political experiences, and materialised alternative socialities. Keeping the movement constantly open to dialogue was their way to give justice to and make real their motto ‘another world is possible’.

Philippe Pignarre and Isabelle Stengers (2011) aptly illustrate the significance of open-endedness for prefigurative politics. Inspired by the writings of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari (1987), the authors argue that capitalism operates through apparatuses of capture by creating boundaries to autonomous thinking and paralysing collective action. In remaining open to multiple ways of imagining and rebuilding society, the Seattle protests had a ‘rhizomatic’ character: for being non-institutionalised, spontaneous, and made up of activists supporting diverse causes, viewpoints, and activist strategies, these kinds of protests are meant to be more resistant to capture by institutional politics. An open letter, petition, or even a march against the WTO conference would have constituted a more easily recognisable repertoire for politicians and the police. It would have enabled them to enact standard protocols to either repress or ignore such expressions of dissatisfaction. A carnivalesque demonstration, on the other hand, shows how resistance can also be aestheticised, making it difficult for politicians, business people, and the police to curb the protest.

In this fashion, Seattle sought to depict neoliberal globalisation not as an abstract, unstoppable process, but as a set of concrete austerity and deregulation measures that can be challenged and mocked by ordinary people. This power of the crowds was later underscored by the motto ‘we are the 99%’, made famous by the 2011 Occupy Wall Street movement, via the argument according to which the majority of the world’s population cannot pay for the mistakes of the upper-class minority.

The Seattle protests also consolidated prefigurative politics not as an ‘anything goes’ way of showing dissatisfaction, but as a strategy in itself (Maeckelbergh 2011). In opposing summits of the G8, NATO, and the World Bank (Graeber 2009), the New Left draws its political action on grassroots democracy, direct action, and the creation of alternative micropolitical relations of power (Yates 2015a). Holding voluntary working groups to set up tents in occupied squares, serving food to participants, protecting them from police action, and keeping spaces of protest clean work to turn hierarchical power relations into inclusive and participatory practices.

In anthropology, the prefiguration debate gained popularity mostly through the work of David Graeber. Actively participating in alterglobalisation movements and demonstrations mainly in the US, Graeber (2002; 2009, xvii) asserts that political activism in the twenty-first century will be increasingly influenced by anarchist imperatives and practices. What Graeber refers to as ‘anarchism’ emerges directly from the left-libertarian tradition that fosters social equality alongside individual freedom. Expressed via direct action, this conception of anarchism is grounded on prefigurative practices that turn activist settings into concrete examples of what ‘real democracy is like’ and how society can take alternative forms—even though such forms do not necessarily reflect left-wing contents. Social scientists who document how such strategies unfold in real life placed prefiguration at the heart of their analyses of mobilisations such as the Occupy movement (Graeber 2009; Razsa and Kurnik 2012), feminist movements (Polletta 2002; Ishkanian and Saavedra 2019; Carmo 2019), France’s Nuit debout protests (Kokoreff 2016), the 15M movement in Spain (Flesher Fominaya 2020), and the World Social Forums held mostly in the Global South (Juris 2005; Teivainen 2016). Going beyond Western urban spaces, some authors have brought anti-state forms of activism for self-determination among Aboriginal peoples in Australia and Amazonian indigenous peoples to this discussion (Petray and Gertz 2018).

Materialising participatory democracy

Prefigurative politics does not just refer to specific forms of protests in which the very process of planning, carrying out, and embodying political action becomes part of the message activists aim to convey (Flesher Fominaya 2014). It also denotes direct ways of living democracy. One of the most closely examined enactments of prefigurative politics are therefore the general assemblies, which are consensual decision-making spaces within occupied squares. As part of a ‘generalised revolt against representation’ (Tormey 2012, 136), participatory democracy carried out by the activists/individuals themselves has become a mechanism to counter representative democracy, which is epitomised by political parties and elections. In general assemblies, participants are placed in a circle to hear those at the centre. No one must block the view of others, so that those who are hard of hearing or far away can understand the speaker through lip reading and body language. When the circle is too wide, participants employ a technique known as ‘the people’s microphone’: people gathered immediately around the speaker repeat everything they say in unison, to make the speaker’s voice reach those at the edges without the need for amplification devices (Deseriis 2014).

General assemblies are expected to give voice to potentially everyone: once joining the speaking queue, participants should speak for themselves, not as spokespersons of any collective or institution (Teivanen 2016; Razsa and Kurnik 2012). Interestingly, giving voice to the 99% starts with empowering activists individually, by placing autonomy at the core of ideal-typical prefigurative politics. General assemblies and decentralised workshops make room for direct action and convergence of thought and action. For instance, middle-class environmentalists may ask manual labourers for guidance on preparing posters on veganism that could find broader appeal, and feminists may advise anarchist students on how to convey their agendas in neutral language. Workshops also propose self-reflection on the commons, raising awareness of issues like racism or ableism among activists, as in this 2011 Occupy Boston workshop:

The facilitator, a white male, began the activity by asking for 20 diverse volunteers to line up side by side at the front of the crowd assembled at the Occupy Boston encampment at Dewey Square. He then issued a series of declarations: ‘If your ancestors lost land by the conquest of the U.S. government, step back; Step forward if your ancestors gained assets through the slave trade; Step back if your ancestors were brought here in chains to be slaves; Step back if you or your ancestors arrived as immigrants from Latin America, Asia, Africa, or the Caribbean’. These and other statements produced a visible line of stratification, with mostly white participants at the front and people of color toward the back (Juris et al. 2012, 434-5).

Opening the microphone and refusing fixed leadership invite activists to enact horizontality and to develop a do-it-yourself attitude. In not belonging to any institutionalised group or political party, such activist spaces are meant to become potentially everyone’s. Joining these spaces involves showing a willingness to leave aside a world driven by discrimination, authoritarianism, and neoliberal practices and setting a ‘frame’ (Bateson 1972, 177–93) wherein hierarchies are temporarily suspended. This frame encourages each participant to act and express oneself not as a representative of given political agendas, social status, or cultural backgrounds, but as individuals who autonomously question, for instance, oppressive, sexist, and colonialist regimes of truth.

Yet, building a new society from the ashes of the old entails carrying with it some of the vicissitudes that activists try to purge from their settings—which evinces the shortcomings of prefigurative politics. Firstly, however globally-oriented and inclusive such movements attempt to be, at times they reproduce gender, racial, and class segregation, as white, richer, better-connected, and male citizens from the Global North (Tarrow 2006: 44; Juris et al. 2012) tend to have more resources and possibilities to afford the time to activism. Regarding horizontality, the assemblies’ open microphone is counterbalanced by how more experienced and articulate activists often dominate these spaces. Sometimes this may entail that marginalised and less educated people will be less prone to talk—and, as open as the microphone might be, less often heard (Beeman et al. 2009; Wengronowitz 2013). Ultimately, horizontal forms of activism may thus lean towards authoritarianism, especially on occasions when more charismatic activists become seen as quasi-‘leaders’ or spokespersons of entire movements.

In addition, while the assembly format implies participatory democracy and gives everybody a say, it means ideas will often be repeated, frequently slowing down the pace of decisions and actions. Paradoxically, processes aimed at consensual decision-making often result neither in decisions nor in consensus, which either hampers the political action or leaves the final decision to the most active and influential activists, thus reproducing the centralised power that prefigurative politics oppose. In a number of movements, the open-endedness and inclusiveness that prevail in prefigurative politics also result in the absence of a coherent overall agenda (Chomsky 2012; Graeber 2013). Although being a feature, rather than a flaw, of these movements, this is read by some as activists being clueless about how to reach their goals (Lipset and Altbach 1966), resulting in movements that may be more expressive than instrumental, privileging spectacle over substance (Polletta 2002: 1-2).

These critiques and seeming flaws stress that creating a democratic culture and experimenting politics differently are forcefully long-term processes. Yet as the commons offer people solidarity and mutual support, they may well emerge as the first steps for people to collectively challenge the mainstream while prefiguring the new.

Rebuilding communication and the media

As the previous discussion on the open microphone suggests, communication technologies and the media play a crucial role in gathering people around political agendas. Just as the screening of the Vietnam War boosted pacifist movements worldwide in the late 1960s (Mandelbaum 1982), recent years have seen the rise of digital media as major networking arenas triggering contentious politics.

Several ethnographies have analysed the emergence of activism on digital media, particularly revolving around hashtags (mostly on Twitter) such as #Ferguson (Bonilla and Rosa 2015), #MeToo (Pipyrou 2018), and #BlackLivesMatter (Yang 2016). While indexing information online, hashtags also create mediatised spaces of peer support and solidarity when people share about their struggles with racism, sexism, and state violence. Due to the heightened temporality in digital media, hashtags mimic the dynamics of face-to-face activism, enabling users to engage almost in real-time with what happens in in-person protests. Thus, the occupation of New York’s Zuccotti Park, Madrid’s Puerta del Sol, Athens’ Syntagma Square, Paris’ Place de la République, and Cairo’s Tahrir Square have been supplemented by the ‘occupation’ of Facebook timelines, YouTube channels, and Twitter feeds with global calls for action and constant updates from the streets (Postill 2014; Castells 2015).

The Arab Spring (2010-2012, beginning in Tunisia) and the 2011 Egyptian Revolution offer a prime illustration of how digital media enable the prefiguration of a more egalitarian society. Bringing together Christians who used to socialise primarily in church and Muslims who tended to gather in and around mosques, the internet helped these groups find commonalities and recognise their shared dissatisfaction with state violence and the Egyptian government. Learning via digital media about protests taking place in neighbouring countries in North Africa and the Middle East, a great number of Egyptians saw their outrage matched by the hope conveyed by activists abroad (Castells 2015). Thus, territorial activism in city squares fed and was fed by deterritorialised activism online, amplifying activists’ voices and the reach of their support. While digital media may usually serve mainstream purposes, they emerge in prefigurative politics as platforms to both build activist networks and critically rebuild communication. In this sense, digital media empower anyone to communicate their own narratives and challenge mainstream regimes of truth by sidestepping the mediation of journalists and the one-to-many functioning of mass media (Castells 2008, 90).

Thinking of the arts and citizen media as prime examples of what John Downing (2001) calls ‘radical media’ enables us to highlight the media’s potential to report state violence in protests and violation of human rights in war-laden countries, as well as to give voice to those who are systematically excluded from mainstream sources of news. In this vein, the 1999-born Independent Media Center (IMC) was a landmark in covering the Seattle protests in real time (Downing 2003). Through its call for arms—‘Don't hate the media, become the media!’—the IMC became the forerunner of analogous grassroots initiatives producing content online without links to corporate news outlets.

Bypassing mainstream mass media does, of course, not always correspond to left-wing forms of prefigurative politics. Aside from bolstering the Arab Spring, digital media also provided the mechanisms that granted the electoral victory to far-right presidential candidates such as the US’s Donald Trump in 2016 (Tufekci 2018) and Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro in 2018 (Cesarino 2020). The same can be said about the COVID-19 anti-vaccine campaigns. On the one hand, presidential campaigns do not concern prefigurative politics entirely as they resort to institutionalised politics and the state in people’s quest for change. On the other hand, online campaigning does retain some of the core traits of prefiguration: it empowers the individual as a key campaigner, who is outside the scope of mass media and is capable of being heard upon producing and sharing content on digital media with relatively little mediation. Campaigners supporting political candidates also enact alternative communities—taking the shape of an online commons—whose members feel safe and welcome to share their political agendas, be they left-leaning or conservative, in line or out of step with a scientific consensus.

Just as media is deconstructed and rebuilt, languages are equally repoliticised in attempts to foster horizontal and inclusive communicative practices. Across the world, translators-activists gather in transnational collectives such as Translator Brigades and Tlaxcala to translate politically engaged articles and subtitle activists’ videos. Translating from hegemonic languages (such as English and French) into non-hegemonic and minority languages, such collectives make multilingual content available online and update activists on the fringe on what is happening elsewhere. Similarly, translating from non-hegemonic languages ensures that language minorities can be heard in activist spaces (Baker 2013, 2016). Relatedly, to fight linguistic discrimination in a different manner, an international collective of left-wing activists resorts to Esperanto—a non-national, easy-to-learn language—to materialise anti-national and anti-imperialist activist spaces. Through face-to-face meetings, mailing lists, and zines, this collective raises people’s awareness of how activism can only be effectively horizontal if everyone has the linguistic and technological means to be equally included in consensual decision-making processes (Fians 2021). Hence, prefigurative politics involve the creation of non-hegemonic communicative and media practices, giving voice and ears to potential participants.

Beyond occupied squares: communities, lifestyles, and the old left

As the aforementioned scholarship illustrates, social scientists have systematically associated prefigurative politics with the ‘movement of the squares’. This invites us to address David Snow’s call to ‘broaden our conceptualisation of social movements beyond contentious politics’ (2004, 19). One way to do so is by exploring prefigurative aspects of community-building, alternative lifestyles, and forms of activism that do not quite fit the New Left label.

First of all, the results of social experiments become more long-lasting when prefiguration meets community-building. This is the case, for instance, of eco-villages, whose participants prefigure their sought-after ecological imaginaries on a daily basis. Eco-villages enable their participants to bridge a consumerist wider society and more eco-friendly forms of sociality by collectively enacting sustainable lifestyles through organic farming and self-sufficiency (Casey et al. 2020). Along analogous lines, other forms of intentional communities—such as ashrams in India and Catholic communities in the UK (Firth 2019, 497)—gather people willing to live according to their spiritual and religious beliefs. This is largely in line with the aforementioned use of prefiguration by Augustine ([1470] 1998), as prefiguring links between spirituality and social justice relates to enacting a spiritually exemplary behaviour that would bring people closer to God and desired forms of spirituality.

A further remarkable illustration of prefiguration in community-building is the celebratory arts community Burning Man. Taking place once a year in the Black Rock Desert, in the US, Burning Man advertises itself as an ‘invitation to the future’. Starting in 1986, it progressively came to gather more than 60,000 participants who spend a week per year living in tents, joining concerts, and co-organising arts projects. While working together to prepare this festival with community-building ambitions, participants fight the perception of labour as alienating. By partly replacing commodification with ‘communification’ through their community-building practice, they infuse mundane labour with a meaning that emphasises one’s connection with the larger Burning Man collective of participants. This altered approach to labour bears long-lasting significance: after having experienced human relations otherwise, participants return to wider society with a renewed perception of how things can work, which eventually encourages them to try and reproduce some aspects of this short-lived experience over their year-long everyday lives (Chen 2016).

While eco-villages, ashrams, arts communities, and even kibbutzim (Simons and Ingram 2003) may be read as escapism, the building of intentional communities does not necessarily mean evading mainstream society. Even within urban settings, community forms such as cooperatives, social centres (Yates 2015b), free schools (Swidler 1979), and communes (Kanter 1972) provide people with the opportunity to temporarily step out of their hierarchical surroundings and join in more horizontal and participatory spaces. These, in turn, do not need to be face-to-face: on the internet, hackers jointly develop free and open-source software as a way of opposing proprietary intellectual property. Through online communities, like-minded activist-developers prefigure the ownership relations, work ethics, and creative aesthetics they envisage by exchanging programming expertise and the source codes they develop (Coleman 2013; Kelty 2008).

Apart from building communities, prefigurative practices can also aim at personal change as the primary means to foster social change. This is the case in lifestyle movements, made up of individuals who seek change by cultivating everyday behaviour in line with their political agendas. These include being vegetarian, reducing one’s carbon footprint, practising ethical consumption (Haenfler et al. 2012), or embracing alternative therapies. Popular psychology, self-help, new-age spiritualities, and mindfulness are recurrently regarded as depoliticising forces that promote conformism. Nevertheless, embodying values that make life meaningful otherwise can also be a political act; one that gives its practitioners a sense of agency amidst disillusionment with collective and institutional ways of fostering social change (Salmenniemi 2019).

Lastly, even though social movement scholarship often associates prefiguration with the post-1960s New Left, prefigurative practices are also present in left-wing parties, trade unions, and hierarchical pre-1960 labour movements. Seeking to explore how anarchist-inspired prefigurative practices have been adopted by a wide range of activists, Graeber (2002, 72; 2010) outlines what he calls ‘capital-A’ and ‘small-a’ anarchists. While the former tend to act within anarchist groups, the latter mobilise characteristically prefigurative practices despite not conceiving of themselves as anarchists—or even as activists.

Despite such practices not being limited to strictly anarchist groups and New Left movements, prefiguration continues being largely conceived of as a marker dividing the New Left from other forms of activism. Why, instead, do not we approach prefiguration as a perspective that highlights the self-exemplification and horizontality inherent in several social movements and forms of activism?

Partly addressing this point, Craig Calhoun (1993) argues that the novelty researchers often associate with the new social movements is analytically misleading, since the issues, strategies, and constituencies that distinguish the New Left and the ‘old lefts’ have been in place for at least two centuries. Ultimately, this leads to a critique of the concept of ‘new social movements’ itself. Cooperativism and the 1871 Paris Commune, for instance, involved activists that, when fighting for their causes, also prioritised the establishment of non-hierarchical relationships. Similarly, issues related to sexuality, lifestyles, women’s rights, and child labour may have become increasingly visible after 1968, but have run alongside class-based demands for centuries. Lastly, exceeding the left versus right divide, conservative movements also deploy prefiguration as a core strategy. This is the case of anti-abortion and white power activists in the US, many of whom are involved in the establishment of Aryan settlements whose residents and visitors receive paramilitary training and cherish white supremacist music and books (Futrell and Simi 2004).

These three forms of prefigurative politics—as a feature of intentional communities, a means to shift individual behaviour, and a building block of New Left, old left, and right-wing movements alike—foreground how pervasive such practices can be, and, therefore, how important it is to understand them.

Coming to a close—but not to conclude

Prefigurative politics—as well as anthropological approaches to it—invite us to rethink social life and its foundations. In placing participation, horizontality, inclusiveness, and direct action at the heart of the social values and practices to be addressed, prefiguration works by changing the world on a small scale. While revolutions foster macropolitical changes, prefigurative politics dwell on micropolitics. Reimagining society locally may not bring about immediate large-scale changes, but it models the society one seeks to build, thus informing its participants’ practices and ways of thinking beyond local activist settings. This work of imagination is not to be underestimated: as climate change, structural racism, and a global pandemic require shifts of mentality and behaviour, practices involving open dialogue, solidarity, and mutual support can provide us with alternative answers to issues that appear not to be sufficiently addressed by institutional politics.

Since most scholars exploring prefigurative politics seem sympathetic to it, there is a lack of studies on prefiguration’s antagonists, such as the police and mass media who frequently link anarchism with chaos and direct action with violence detached from clear political agendas. For similar reasons, few studies analyse prefiguration among old left and right-wing activists, which culminates in the aforementioned misapprehension of prefiguration as a strictly New Left strategy. Aside from helping us to better understand the present-oriented efforts to build alternative societies, learning about prefigurative politics also provides us with tools to experiment with grassroots initiatives in our everyday lives and in our academic discipline. Ultimately, would not action anthropology (Smith 2010) be in line with such horizontal and inclusive practices? Remaining true to prefiguration, it is better to just leave this and other questions open.

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Note on contributor

Guilherme Fians is a Leverhulme Research Fellow at the University of St Andrews (Scotland) and Co-Director of the Centre for Research and Documentation on World Language Problems (Netherlands/USA). Guilherme’s current research project—on social movements, language politics, and digital media, with a focus on France—is funded by the Leverhulme Trust and Esperantic Studies Foundation. In line with his commitment to multilingualism in academia, he has published and presented his research outcomes in English, Portuguese, French, German, and Esperanto.

Dr Guilherme Fians, Institute for Transnational and Spatial History, University of St Andrews, St Katharine’s Lodge, The Scores, KY16 9BA, St Andrews, United Kingdom, gmf7@st-andrews.ac.uk

Literacy

Rebecca Tishler — Thu, 02 Dec 2021 03:45:18 +0000

Mark Turin Robert Hanks

University of British Columbia

Initially published 2 Dec 2021

http://doi.org/10.29164/21literacy

Abstract:

Literacy is a linguistic innovation characterised by the encoding and decoding of language into a system of visual signs whose relevance to daily life in most societies cannot be overstated. Understood to be both a technology and a social practice, literacy has been the subject of anthropological inquiry since the late nineteenth century, with protracted debates about its effects on human consciousness and social life. This entry tracks the development of literacy as a concept.

Initially dominated by technologically deterministic assertions that literacy was a tool for sociocultural and cognitive development, anthropology would later embrace the more culturally relativistic perspective advanced by the New Literacy Studies movement of the 1980s and 1990s. This movement sought to understand how cultural logics and norms informed the development of localised literacy practices, thus creating variations of ‘literacies’ which were themselves embedded within ideologies and structures of power relations. Coming to recognise the marginalising power of standardised literacy, anthropology turned its attention to education.

Anthropologists and educators have become partners in research dedicated to developing pedagogical practices that draw upon the unique linguistic resources and practices that students bring with them into the classroom to cultivate inclusivity and empowerment. The increasing prevalence of digital technologies in all aspects of daily life have challenged earlier notions of literacy, inspiring anthropologists to investigate how people draw upon multiple modalities to encode and decode meaning, thereby fundamentally reshaping our understanding of what it means to ‘read and write’.

Introduction

Literacy is such a central part of most people’s everyday lives that its ubiquity can be taken for granted. Scholars have highlighted how, for many of us, literacy represents an essential pathway to development and personal liberation that has the power to cure almost any social ill (Bialostok & Whitman 2006: 382-3; Street 1997: 49; Ong 2012). Literacy is often presented as an ability with such transformative potential that becoming literate leads to a fundamental redefinition of an individual’s identity (Riemer 2008; Ahearn 2004). However, there are communities for whom literacy can be a less integral, sometimes even inappropriate, means for documenting and communicating language (Debenport 2015). In circumventing the constraints of the written word, such communities seek alternative ways of transmitting ideas, both orally and through other technologies (Finnegan 2012; Turin et al. 2013). Considering the perceived centrality of literacy to most contemporary human societies, and its continued absence from others, how has anthropology contributed to a cross-cultural understanding of literacy?

Broadly defined as both a technology and a social practice, literacy has been characterised as communication through an invented system of visually decoded signs, rather than by oral or gestural modes (Besnier 1999: 141). As an area of interest, literacy has figured prominently in anthropological inquiry since the discipline’s inception, as scholars sought to make sense of what the ability to read and write means for us. While studies have included exploring the origins, use, and transmission of different writing systems, the central question remains: does giving a tangible form to the most fundamental aspect of humanity, namely our capacity for language, transform how we think about, perceive, and process the world around us? In essence, does literacy change who we are as humans? Understanding this has become all the more relevant as the rapid transition from analogue to digital technologies further complicates how people engage with the written word, and thus reshapes our sense of what it means to be literate (Jewitt 2006; Wolf 2017).

In this entry, we track the progression of literacy through different eras of anthropological theory. Early interpretations treated literacy as a lens for analyses at the societal level, a framework that saw writing systems as a means for differentiating between cultures and their imagined evolutionary, cognitive, and socioeconomic development, which thus helped to frame literacy as an autonomous technology independent of its social contexts (Morgan 1878: 3, 11). While this position has softened over the years, the crucial link between literacy and consciousness was maintained as scholars emphasised the intrinsic benefits that a literate mind offered individuals and the societies in which they lived (Goody & Watt 1963; Ong 2012).

Beginning in the 1980s, anthropologists began to reflect on the sociocultural underpinnings of literacy practices, with the scale of analysis narrowing to focus on local specificity and variation (Scribner & Cole 1981). Strict definitions of ‘literacy’ and what it meant to be ‘literate’ were shown to be implicated in the hegemonic ideologies that structure our societies and determine our values, and have given way to more nuanced understandings (Bialostok & Whitman 2006; Street 1997; Blommaert 2008). This newer movement in literacy studies situated literacy’s power to marginalise and sought to re-evaluate the diversity of written language in ways that challenged normative assumptions prevalent in earlier models. Insights generated by a sociocultural approach to literacy have motivated anthropologists to work with educators to make pedagogical literacy practices more inclusive and empowering for students (Street 1997; Hornberger 2003). The increasing centrality of digital technologies in all aspects of daily life (Horst & Miller 2012) has led to a re-scoping of what it means to read and write, with traditional definitions of literacy becoming less relevant to understanding the emergent meaning-making processes of digital texts.

Literacy and pre-literature

In the discipline’s early years, anthropologists took so-called ‘primitive’ peoples as their subjects of inquiry to expand their understandings of humanity (Mandelbaum 1955: 213; Hsu 1964: 169). Broadly applied to peoples living beyond the cultural and political ‘West’, the term ‘primitive’ invoked a Hobbesian image of primordial humanity that contrasted with the presumed cultural, historical, and linguistic sophistication of the societies from which anthropologists hailed (Faris 1925: 711; Hsu 1964: 169). While the term ‘primitive’ was used extensively by prominent anthropological theorists at the time, objections quickly arose due to its analytical ambiguity and racist implications of superiority and inferiority (Faris 1925: 711; Hsu 1964: 173). In response, and on account of their apparent objectivity and perceived greater scientific precision, the terms ‘non-literate’ or ‘pre-literate’ arose as alternatives to the ‘primitive’/ ‘civilised’ opposition.

Unlike primitivity, ‘literacy’ was considered to carry less awkward baggage, being an attainable state of socioeconomic and cognitive development rather than an essential and inherent condition. Those who had not yet learned to read could be identified as ‘non-literate’ or ‘pre-literate’, only because written literature had not been introduced or developed in their societies (Faris 1925: 711-2; Hsu 1964: 169). However, the use of ‘non-literate’ or ‘pre-literate’ also assumed that literacy and orality were mutually exclusive (Dickinson 1994: 320) and presented literacy as the first step towards greater civilisation and sophistication (Faris 1925: 712). The essence of the connection between literacy and civilisation derived from a belief that written language had an inevitable impact on how people understood, interpreted, and made sense of the world around them.

As twentieth century scholars became increasingly interested in understanding how language might shape thought and culture (Whorf 1952; Lévi-Strauss 1966), the physical form of written language came to be seen as more than a simple representation of speech, and rather a unique form of language in its own right (Brockmeier & Olson 2009: 5, 8). While earlier assumptions ascribed a ‘prelogical’ cognitive state to ‘primitive’ peoples, a notion assuming that such communities were completely uninterested in abstract thinking and focused solely on ensuring their basic needs of survival (Lévy-Bruhl 2018; Brockmeier & Olson 2009: 10), Claude Lévi-Strauss demonstrated how both literate and oral peoples engage in the rational ordering of the world, albeit from quite different perspectives (1966: 269). Oral peoples were presented as reasoning with a ‘mythical thought’ pattern that was ‘entangled in imagery’, while literate peoples could reason at a ‘concrete’ level that was detached from perception and imagination (Lévi-Strauss 2001: 11-2; Lévi-Strauss 1966: 15, 20, 22).

Drawing from linguistic theory, Lévi-Strauss posited that the key difference between literate and oral thought processes was the capacity of the literate mind to distinguish between signs and the signified, thus being able to explore the relationship between images and the concepts they represent (Lévi-Strauss 1966: 18, 21). This perspective continues into the present with cognitive scientists like David Olson asserting that literacy leads to a meta-awareness of language that allows for an objectified and decontextualised understanding of concepts (2017: 239). Writing, having the capacity to lift words (signs and concepts) out of context, transforms them into objects that can be scrutinised and categorised on their own without attachment to a particular image or signification (Olson 2017: 241). In this way, the rationality of the literate mind has been compared to that of an engineer looking for ways to think beyond cultural and categorical constraints by critically focusing on its constituent elements, whereas the oral mind was theorised as only capable of rearranging, and never thinking beyond, the categories it was given (Lévi-Strauss 1966: 19).

While ‘literature’ is generally used to refer only to cultural expressions with written form, there is no compelling reason to treat the verbal art of oral societies as fundamentally different to written traditions: oral literatures simply exist at one end of the spectrum of literary types (Finnegan 2012: 20, 27; Turin et al. 2013). A bias towards the written word combined with the tendency of anthropologists to record and transcode oral traditions into textual form (Turin 2014) has resulted in the misrepresentation of oral literatures as simply verbatim transmissions of narratives across generations, and further contributes to the belief that such traditions are cruder than written literature (Finnegan 2012: 15-6). In reality, the difference between written and oral literature is the mode of transmission: oral literatures are more dependent on live (and increasingly online) performances and are therefore characterised by greater variability as performers improvise and innovate, often in active dialogue with their audience (Finnegan 2012: 10-2). In contrast to the unchanging physical form of written texts which can be transmitted unaltered across time and space (albeit subject to much reinterpretation), the composition and dissemination of oral literature—much like music and dance—is dependent upon and inextricably linked to the performative context (Finnegan 2012: 4-5, 14). While this difference in tangibility has led to academic and popular assumptions regarding the supposed objectivity and verifiability of written historical narratives, Michel-Rolph Trouillot (2015) critiques such perspectives as holding a positivist bias that fails to account for how power enters into the process of constructing historical narratives. This results in conceptions of history that present a ‘fixed past’, whereas the ‘truth’ of history is actually intimately tied to the present even in the case of written records.

Working through the dichotomies: primitive/civilised and oral/literate

Early anthropologists like Lewis Henry Morgan (1878) suggested that writing gave a permanence to language that was fundamental for understanding a particular society’s thought processes and its capacity for development. For late nineteenth to mid-twentieth century anthropologists, literacy represented a necessary precondition for a culture to be considered a ‘Civilization’ within the monodirectional and evolutionary logic that served to organise all societies (Morgan 1878: 3, 11; Hsu 1964: 169; Akinnaso 1981: 180). While scholars would later criticise their predecessors for assuming radical cognitive differences between literate and oral peoples, many anthropologists nevertheless felt comfortable asserting that written language had a deterministic influence on an individual’s analytical processes and capacities (Goody & Watt 1963: 321; Ong 2012: 8-9).

This position is known as the ‘universalist’ or ‘autonomous’ model of literacy. It understands writing to be a technology reliant on generalised skills and language practices that in turn impact an individual’s linguistic, cultural, and cognitive potential (Collins 1995: 75; Akinnaso 1981: 187; Ong 2012: 77-8, 81). Some observers, like Walter Ong, travelled far with this perspective, asserting that writing is an inevitable, even ‘absolutely necessary’, technology for the development of science, history, and philosophy; a precondition for nuanced understandings of art and language without which humans will not achieve their full cognitive potential (2012: 14-5).

According to this logic, and given their lack of written records, oral societies were presumed to be homeostatic, that is, internally and perpetually stable, operating with a model of cultural transmission incapable of distinguishing between history and myth, past and present. Literate societies, on the other hand, could draw on written records and were thus positioned to make objective distinctions between ‘what was and what is’ (Goody & Watt 1963: 308, 310-1; Ong 2012: 8; Faris 1925: 712). In this conceptualisation, literacy was a means for expanding a society’s capacity for rational and abstract thought (Langlois 2006: 18; Akinnaso 1981: 164; Ong 2012: 102) and if properly harnessed, could catalyse socioeconomic and cognitive development (Collin 2013: 29; Akinnaso 1981: 164, 169).

Research on oral literature has challenged the prevailing and myopic assumptions in the autonomous model of literacy. Comparative research shows that technologies like writing are better conceptualised as shaping, rather than determining, our collective and individual recollections (Martindale et al. 2018: 198; Scribner & Cole 1981). Archaeological evidence, for example, corroborates thousands of years of layered histories as recorded in the oral narratives of Tsimshian people in British Columbia, Canada, while members of the Thangmi community in Nepal disrupt the presumed path of orality to literacy by incorporating digital technologies as part of their techniques of recording oral history (Martindale et al. 2018: 199-200, 202). The centrality of oral performances to the recitation of origin myths by ritual practitioners is internalised by members of the Thangmi community who view orality as a source of strength and as essential to their ethnic identity (Shneiderman 2015: 64, 82-3). As a consequence, writing down the oral performances of Thangmi ritual practitioners can be seen as undermining the very feature that makes these narratives identifiably Thangmi (Shneiderman 2015: 83, 87). Alternative technologies, such as audio and video, present a more desirable means of documenting and transmitting oral narratives for practitioners who thereby retain control over the message, with multimedia helping to emphasise distinctiveness and variation, avoiding the pitfalls of standardisation through the mediation of the written word (Shneiderman 2015: 64, 87, 96).

Christine Helliwell’s work in a Borneo Dayak community further demonstrates the diverse understandings encoded in oral literature by contrasting two distinct narrative genres, the sensangan and the cerito Nosi (2012: 52). Both of these genres are considered high prestige art forms of storytelling and recount epic poems of great heroes, often taking many hours to complete. Despite this general similarity, they differ in a number of significant ways: the sensangan are a corpus of tales about the culture-hero and trickster Koling that are each narrated as a slow song with a drum accompaniment, whereas cerito Nosi are standalone stories chanted quickly without any accompanying instruments (Helliwell 2012: 54, 57). The different pacing and styles by which these two distinct genres are performed affect how the audience experiences and interprets their content. The slow pace of the sensangan allows for the content to be discussed by the audience as it is performed, while the rapid chanting of the cerito Nosi necessitates focussed attention. In contrast to theories that present oral societies as incapable of distinguishing between myth and history, the unique performative styles of these genres illustrate important differences in how their content is interpreted, impacting the level of truth attributed to the stories by the audiences (Helliwell 2012: 53, 60).

Robin Wall Kimmerer (2013) challenges the assumed necessity of written language for scientific knowledge with a description of the Onondaga Nation’s Thanksgiving Address. This ancient practice of expressing gratitude to the environment speaks to the relationship that the Onondaga Nation has to the natural world (Kimmerer 2013: 107-8, 111). As speakers name and thank each species in turn for their roles in sustaining the environment, the structure of the Thanksgiving Address serves as a scientific inventory of ecological information, ‘a lesson in Native science’ that unifies the speaker and audience in a collective reflection on the ethic of responsibility towards the land (Kimmerer 2013: 108, 110, 115). Crucially, much of the power of the Thanksgiving Address comes from its oral performance which, in contrast to a written document that may be skimmed, requires the audience to actively participate for the duration of its lengthy recitation and creates the space to contemplate one’s relationship to the environment (Kimmerer 2013: 110). Kimmerer asserts that Indigenous knowledge practices like the Thanksgiving Address can complement Western science’s focus on matter by interweaving Indigenous understandings of respect and gratitude, and by positioning ecological restoration as a return to reciprocal relations between humans and the environment (2013: 257, 263).

In short, while some communities may not have a long history of written texts, this does not imply that their histories and perspectives are solely confined to the present (Martindale et al. 2018: 205). Moreover, the assertion of the autonomous model that literacy results in improved rationality remains questionable when considering how real-time, in vivo oral performances allow for audience members to challenge and seek clarification from performers (Finnegan 2012: 14). This is no new realisation: Socrates himself identified that an inherent flaw of written language was its inflexibility. Seen in this light, the written word can hinder deeper understanding because a reader cannot challenge or seek clarification from a text. By definition, written words just keep repeating themselves (Wolf 2017: 76; Plato 2002).

Even though evolutionary theories of literacy fell out of fashion and remain unsupported by ethnographic evidence, literacy has continued to be used to distinguish between human cultures (Goody & Watt 1963: 321; Akinnaso 1981: 164). In particular, the imagined capacity for social organisation, socioeconomic growth, and cognitive development that some acquaint with literacy continue to situate the terms ‘non-literate’, ‘pre-literate’, or ‘oral’ alongside a reduced level of technological development in ways that are unfortunate (Berndt 1960: 64; Akinnaso 1981: 164). While not connected to the earlier evolutionary theories, the technological determinism implicit in the autonomous model of literacy assumes negative consequences for both cognition and society in the absence of literacy. Furthermore, the standards by which certain language practices are recognised as constituting ‘literacy’ must be considered in light of the colonial histories that have informed those very standards.

As part of the colonial project, languages were historically equated with race, with non-European languages and their speakers categorised as inferior to Europeans and their language practices (Rosa & Flores 2017: 623-4). These racio-linguistic ideologies continue today in forms such as ‘standardised languages’ which can legitimate the language practices of White speakers by positioning their language practices as the ‘norm’ or ‘ideal’ to be used in written texts (Rosa 2016: 163, 165; Baker-Bell 2020), thus devaluing and discounting the diversity of reading and writing practices that exist outside of this narrow standard (Rosa 2019: 187-8). For this, the autonomous model of literacy has been critiqued as merely replacing one racist and evolutionary dichotomy (primitive/civilised) with another: preliterate/literate or oral/literate (Akinnaso 1981: 164; Langlois 2006: 16-7; Collin 2013: 29-30).

Literacy as a sociocultural practice

From the 1980s, anthropologists grew dissatisfied with the essentialising dichotomies that had characterised mid-twentieth century theories and that posited a ‘great divide’ between societies. Such simplistic binaries failed to explain the complexity and rationality present in oral societies (Collin 2013: 30; Bialostok & Whitman 2006: 382), not to mention the many varied ways in which oral and written language are used (Stephens 2000: 11; Dickinson 1994). In response, scholars shifted their inquiries from broad societal-level analyses to the local and granular, proposing a sociocultural model in which literacy was better understood as a collective activity with varied potentials dependent upon how a particular community incorporated writing into their processes (Collin 2013: 30; Street 2013: 54). Referred to as ‘New Literacy Studies’ (NLS), this movement made use of more ethnographic approaches and embraced a cultural understanding of literacy as a practice embedded within, and defined by, institutional settings and everyday life (Collins 1995: 80-1; Stephens 2000: 10).

In addition, NLS rejected the idea that writing was no more than a general skillset easily transposable onto different contexts. For example, the ubiquity of keyboard writing in certain societies has meant that ‘computer literacy’ has supplanted analogue forms of literacy practices to such an extent that being ‘computer illiterate’ is seen as equivalent to being illiterate (Blommaert 2008: 5). NLS proposes a relativistic, dynamic, and situated model that recognises diverse forms of ‘literacies’ embedded within particular cultural contexts, norms, and discourses. These vary across time and space and are tied to how individuals construct their identities (Collins 1995: 75-6; Street 1997: 48; Riemer 2008: 444).

NLS is therefore understood to advocate a culturally relativistic approach (Collin 2013: 32), with aligned research demonstrating how textual practices are influenced by cultural logics and beliefs (Riemer 2008), such as the use of magical writing in Ecuador as means of critiquing state power (Wogan 2004), or the strict norms regulating the creation and dissemination of textual documents to preserve community secrecy in a New Mexico Pueblo community (Debenport 2015). The NLS approach has encouraged anthropologists to reflect on how their own level of literacy in the ‘texts’ of the communities with whom they work may affect their interpretations. Researchers often ‘normatively reorganize’ texts, silencing the original author’s voice (Blommaert 2008: 10-1), while in other cases have little or no reading ability in the predominant written language of the communities with whom they work, calling into question the kinds of knowledge represented in anthropologist’s publications (Allen 1992; Ortner 1992).

A key element of NLS is the realisation that literacy functions as an ideology, and that the uses, meanings, definitions of, and efforts to control literacy policies are embedded within wider relations of power (Street 1997: 48; Wogan 2003: 66; Blommaert 2008: 6). Determinist assumptions inherent in the autonomous model of literacy cultivated a conviction within development organisations that literacy was a panacea for all social ills, leading to the entanglement of literacy programs with free-market neoliberal capitalism (Street 1997: 49; Bialostok & Whitman 2006: 384). Targeting Indigenous peoples and other marginalised populations, development-minded literacy programs remain tethered to earlier missionary activities which sought to ‘civilise’ non-Western peoples through education and religious conversion (Bialostok & Whitman 2006: 382-3; Wogan 2004: 62-4; Besnier 1995).

Literacy interventions across the Global South during the mid-twentieth century, while distinct from the ethnocentric drive of missionary literacy programs, nevertheless upheld colonial ideologies through a ‘liberal paternalism’ that identified literacy as the path to progress and modernity (Bialostok & Whitman 2006: 383). In such thinking, literacy was a mechanism for moral transformation, constituting new subjectivities in the context of modern capitalist states, with schools serving as key institutional sites for integrating individuals into the nation (Collins 1995: 82; Riemer 2008: 450). ‘Schooled literacy’, that is, standardised writing practices as transmitted in educational settings, replaced diverse literacies that were present in other social spheres (Collins 1995: 82). These diverse literacies might have included the reading of religious texts for ritual purposes, the use of books in children’s play (such as word games and puzzles), or reading stories aloud in the home (De la Piedra 2009: 116, 121; O’Neil 2007: 172). María Teresa De la Piedra’s research on the multiple forms of ‘hybrid literacy practices’ that coexist within the rural Urpipata community in Peru demonstrates that the replacement of alternative literacies with schooled literacy is not necessarily total; individuals continue to mix and appropriate Quechua and Spanish literacy for use in different contexts and to fulfil their own purposes (2009: 110, 112–3).

Jan Blommaert (2008) classifies alternative literacies under the umbrella term ‘grassroots literacy’, which he applies to a broad range of ‘non-elite’ literacy practices. These forms of writing deviate from standardised norms of spelling and speech and can usually only be interpreted within a local context (Blommaert 2008: 7, 193). Graffiti is an example of a grassroots literacy in which reading and decoding a script is only accessible to other graffiti writers (Blommaert 2008: 193). Some scholars consider schooled literacy to be part of an elite-led movement against grassroots literacies, seeking to establish a particular literacy standard as foundational for citizenship and the moral order, contributing to the problematic use of the term ‘officially literate’ as a necessary requirement to access social standing (Collins 1995: 82-3; Erickson 1984: 525; Rosa 2019; Baker-Bell 2020).

Laura Ahearn (2004) and Frances Riemer (2008) examine the effects of development-minded literacy programs in Nepal and Botswana. In Junigau, Nepal, Ahearn studied women’s newly acquired literacy skills in the 1990s in the context of the writing of love-letters and suggested that a growth in romantic elopements indicated that learning to write love-letters impacted how villagers conceptualised their agency (2004: 306). In Ahearn’s analysis, the dominant discourses of Nepali society encouraged a moral connection between the acquisition of literacy skills and increased development, capitalism, independence, and agency (2004: 309, 311). However, in connecting literacy to a belief that romantic love was integral to modern life (Ahearn 2004: 308, 312), development-minded literacy education in Junigau may have inadvertently resulted in women’s disempowerment, as those who chose to elope often lost the support of their natal families. Demonstrating how women who later faced difficulties in their marriage had few options, Ahearn challenges an instrumental view that positions literacy as a necessarily positive capacity that inevitably leads to greater empowerment (2004: 313).

Riemer’s research into the meanings ascribed to literacy in Botswana demonstrates that while adult learners may frame their path to literacy as coming to see ‘the light’, the greater sense of personal empowerment they experience as a result also leads to their increased participation in the modern global capitalist system (2008: 449-50, 458). Riemer describes a cultural model in which strong associations exist between literacy, education, and moral transformation, and the acquisition of literacy skills through schooling involves reconstructing one’s identity to be a full member of a modern community (2008: 451-2). Aside from the technical skills associated with literacy, the transformed sense of self produced through school-based literacy programs further situated these new readers in a nexus of discursive power relations constructed by ideologies of race, Christian morality, and political economy (Riemer 2008: 456-8). In this analysis, the desire for literacy—and the sense of personal empowerment that students feel—can be read as a ‘discipline’ in the Foucauldian sense in which literacy generates compliance and functions as a tool for assimilation (Riemer 2008: 458).

An anthropology of literacy education

The aversion to generalisation that informs NLS’s descriptivist approach to literacy limits its effectiveness as a scalable educational model, running the risk of generating little more than collected anecdotes about diverse forms of literacies (Besnier 1999: 141; Stephens 2000: 19). While acknowledging the importance of contextuality to literacy, Kate Stephens argues that some aspects of literacy skills development are not context-specific and can indeed be generalised, and that there is educational value in understanding how writing can be recontextualised and interpreted across time and space (2000: 12-3). Furthermore, while superior cognitive processing is not necessarily a consequence of being literate, there is increasing evidence indicating that literacy does support cognitive potentialities that cultivate skills like metalinguistic knowledge: that is, knowledge about language that may be impossible to harness without the linguistic objectification associated with literacy (Stephens 2000: 14, 16-7; Wolf 2017; Olson 1977; Olson 1994). A ‘literacy for education’ approach can balance the action-oriented concerns of educators with a greater anthropological recognition of context by offering language instruction for specific contexts and purposes (Stephens 2000: 20-1). So managed, the problem of shoehorning strict definitions of literacy into a narrow standard can be offset by expanding the range of practices that qualify as ‘literate’, thus diversifying the writing contexts for which students are prepared (Akinnaso 1981: 167; Street 2013: 60).

H. Samy Alim et al.’s (2011) examination of Hip Hop literacies offers an example of how the cultural relativism of NLS can mesh with the development of effective pedagogical models. While the Black English language used in Hip Hop has been criticised as ‘illiterate’, scholars point out that the grammatical prescriptivism of ‘standard English’ is itself artistically limiting and an example of linguistic racism that devalues the language and literacy practices of marginalised communities (Alim et al. 2011: 121; Baker-Bell 2020: 15-6). Recognising the normalising power of ‘schooled literacy’ in defining standards of educability (Collins 1995: 83; Erickson 1984: 531; Rosa & Flores 2017: 626-7), Alim et al. advocate for literacy education that locates its goals within the lived realities of its students by making it ‘ILL’, namely: Intimate, Lived, and Liberatory (2011: 134). Through Hip Hop, young people introduce their own cultural standards and prioritise ‘ill-legitimate’ artistic creativity, challenging dominant ideals of correctness by defining their textual practices as ill, or skilled (Alim et al. 2011: 122).

‘Ill-literacy studies’ helps to frame American educational institutions as illiterate on account of their inability to decode the culturally rich and linguistically complicated experiences of their students. This institutional illiteracy results in schools failing to take advantage of the range of opportunities for true learning (Alim et al. 2011: 122, 132). Drawing on NLS, which situates literacies within the politics of unequal power relations, identity formation, and state authority in modern capitalist nation-states (Alim et al. 2011: 133; Collins 1995: 81-2), ill-literacy studies redefines ‘being literate’ as a capacity to critique dominant ideologies and reclaim one’s own voice from the constraints of institutional structures and practices (Alim et al. 2011: 133).

Pedagogical strategies such as Alim et al.’s (2011) ill-literacy studies align with what April Baker-Bell calls ‘Antiracist Black Language Pedagogy’, which provide students with the opportunity to learn about and through Black English, thereby educating them into a ‘Black Linguistic Consciousness’ that can heal the traumas of ‘Anti-Black Linguistic Racism’ while simultaneously nurturing their language abilities (2020: 8, 34). Critical pedagogies of this type are crucial as they enable students and educators to see past the narrow-minded binary of the ‘street’ versus the ‘school’ that forces students’ identities, communicative repertoires, and literacy skills into contradictory categories that reproduce problematic hierarchies (Rosa 2019: 207-8). In this re-framing, students are not marginalised minorities but rather complicated individuals capable of giving voice to their lived realities through the use of ill-literate texts, without necessarily shunning the acquisition of traditional literacy skills (Alim et al. 2011: 134, 136, 140). So viewed, ill-literate pedagogies help to nurture metaliteracy and greater awareness in learners, uplifting their social consciousness beyond dominant ideologies of language and identity (Alim et al. 2011: 140).

Multilingualism and literacy education

As processes associated with globalisation bring ever-greater numbers of multilingual students into schools, literacy researchers face the difficult task of making sense of the specific challenges and opportunities that multilingualism introduces into the classroom environment (Hornberger 2003: 4). Beginning in the late 1980s, researchers identified a glaring gap between the extensive literature on multilingualism and writings on literacy. In response, a theoretical approach was developed for understanding how these two aligned phenomena interact with and shape one another (Hornberger 2003: 4). The concept of ‘biliteracy’ is the result of these inquiries and offers an analytical framework applicable to any occurrence of reading or writing in which more than one language features (Hornberger 2003: 5).

The biliteracy model does not characterise multilingualism and literacy through a binary perspective that (re)produces oppositions like first language (L1) vs. second language (L2), monolingual vs. bilingual, or literate vs. oral. Instead, it understands any single biliterate practice to be entangled within each of these states simultaneously. In this way, the biliteracy model conceptualises states of language as multiple, intersecting, and nested continua that together constitute a complex whole (Hornberger 2003: 4-5; Hornberger & Link 2012: 264). Briefly, these continua describe the media through which different languages are used; the contexts in which language and literacy practices are enacted and evaluated; and the content expressed by language and literacy practices; that is, their styles, genres, and the perspectives they communicate. In contrast to the compartmentalising and decontextualising perspectives that typically inform educational policies and practices, the biliteracy model enables researchers and educators to delve into multilingual settings and unpack how the development of biliterate skills occurs so that novel solutions in support of literacy education for multilingual learners may be imagined (Hornberger & Link 2012: 265; Hornberger 2003: 25).

Nancy Hornberger and Holly Link describe a scenario in which bilingual first grade students read an English language text while discussing it with one another in Spanish, and then respond to their teacher’s inquiries in English (2012: 269). The biliteracy model makes clear that, while the teacher’s acceptance of Spanish dialogue offsets obvious power dynamics and helps to validate students’ voices, the use of English as the sole language of instruction limits the possibilities for biliteracy development as Spanish is only permitted for oral communication (Hornberger & Link 2012: 270). Similarly, Melisa Cahnmann’s study of a grade nine Spanish-English classroom examines how correction and assessment strategies influence student resistance or acceptance of biliterate practices (2003: 191). During the research, Cahnmann learned that students would often draw upon their Spanish linguistic resources to aid them in the creation of English-language texts. For example, to assist herself in spelling the English word ‘people’, one student verbalised the Spanish phonemes of ‘PE-O-PE-LE’ [pronounced as ‘pay-oh-pay-lay’ in English] (Cahnmann 2003: 193). While some experts in second language acquisition believe that such inter-lingual transcoding should be discouraged, the biliteracy model considers any kind of transfer along the L1-L2 continuum to be an opportunity, because it reveals students’ strengths and identifies areas where teachers can focus their energy to support positive and impactful learning (Cahnmann 2003: 192-3).

The key insight of biliteracy is that interrelatedness between continua ensures that literacy and language skills can develop across and between different languages and literacies, with contextual factors determining and shaping specific manifestations (Hornberger 2003: 25). Stronger biliteracy skills will therefore emerge in environments that encourage students to draw on all points of the continua (Hornberger & Link 2012: 265). Crucially, this analytical framework is capable of recognising and incorporating students’ multilingual practices as part of a classroom’s learning resources, critiquing standard literacy norms while also producing alternative outcomes (Hornberger & Link 2012: 274; Cahnmann 2003: 189).

Re-imagining literacy in a digital world

The circulation of fast-changing information technologies and media in the twenty-first century introduces new aspects to established questions about what it means to be ‘literate’ in an overwhelmingly digital era (Wolf 2017: 219-20). Does the immediate access to vast amounts of information through Internet technologies change how people critically engage with texts (Wolf 2017: 222-3)? There is growing concern among researchers and educators that the shift from physical to digital texts may result in a reduction in the ability of young readers to analyse and think beyond the words they read, thus failing to perceive deeper meanings. In response, literacy research is moving towards understanding how students can become ‘multitextual’, that is, proficient in reading and analysing different kinds of texts in adaptable ways to harness the benefits of both print and digital media (Wolf 2017: 223, 226-7).

Multimodality is a theoretical approach to meaning-making that stems from social semiotics: the study of the social life of signs and symbols (Jewitt 2006: 3). In this framework, ‘signs’ refer to the association of meaning to a form; ‘modes’ describe the different forms in which signs are constructed (for example, an image versus a written word); and ‘media’ applies to the ways in which modes disseminate their signs (for example, ink on paper, computer screens, etc.) (Heydon 2007: 39). A social semiotic approach to the sociality of language recognises that linguistic meanings are constantly reproduced through people’s sociocultural work and are not simply a pre-existing code waiting to be activated (Jewitt 2006: 3). Multimodality extends this theory to suggest that the production of meaning is further influenced by any modes through which signs are communicated (Jewitt 2006: 3). In reconceptualising literacy as ‘multimodal design’, the analytical lens offered by multimodal literacy takes the focus away from the written word and broadens the frame to examine how people make meaning through the many modes and media to which they have access (Heydon 2007: 38; Jewitt 2006: 8).

Applying the multimodal literacy framework to new digital technologies can illustrate how digital media are reconfiguring our understanding of writing in generative ways (Jewitt 2006: 107). In particular, the dominance of writing is being decentred through digital technologies that harness images, speech, music, and moving elements to communicate (Jewitt 2006: 108; Heydon 2007: 39). In the classroom, there is increasing reliance on forms of ‘edutainment’; that is, games, computer applications, and videos used for educational purposes, in place of strictly textual resources (Jewitt 2006: 6-7, 108). The influence of the digital screen on the meaning of texts is so great that, even when it is used to render the written word, as in an e-book, it mediates how we encounter and interpret the text we read. For example, book layout is often restructured to fit a screen, altering how a textual narrative is represented on a page (Jewitt 2006: 108-9). Carey Jewitt asserts that new digital media are changing what literacy means so profoundly that it may soon no longer be possible to define reading solely as the act of interpreting the written word (2006: 123). Instead, readers will have to make sense of all the features that have been enabled by the capabilities of the digital screen as they navigate the meanings communicated by a screen’s multimodal design (Jewitt 2006: 123). Effectively ‘reading’ a digital text, then, also requires understanding how the design of images and writing contribute to the realisation of the text’s own meaning (Jewitt 2006: 136).

Conclusion

This entry offers a review of how literacy has been theorised in anthropology since the first days of the discipline. While perspectives have changed over the years, with definitions of literacy fluctuating between opposing frameworks of technological determinism and cultural relativism, the underlying theme remains unaltered: the development of literacy represents one of the most significant innovations of human history.

Despite more than a century’s worth of research on literacy, questions about how humans shape literacy and how literacy shapes humans continue to be actively discussed. The rapid development of new information and media technologies has only accentuated the conversation. As new media invite novel possibilities for encoding and decoding meaning, which in turn result in changes in language practices, communication, and society, literacy will continue to be a prominent subject of anthropological research. If the history of anthropological theory is any indication of its future, the role of literacy in shaping the human condition will be ardently debated as its function is productively reinterpreted.

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Note on contributors

Mark Turin is an Associate Professor at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada, cross-appointed between the departments of Anthropology and the Institute of Critical Indigenous Studies. His research is situated in the fields of language documentation, reclamation, and revitalisation with regional focuses on the Himalaya and the Pacific Northwest of Canada. ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2262-0986

Prof. Mark Turin, Department of Anthropology, Faculty of Arts, University of British Columbia, 2104 – 6303 NW Marine Drive, Vancouver, BC Canada V6T 1Z1. mark.turin@ubc.ca

Robert Hanks is a graduate student in the department of Anthropology at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada. His research examines language and literacy education in multilingual contexts and the decolonisation of pedagogy. ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3788-321X

Robert Hanks, Department of Anthropology, Faculty of Arts, University of British Columbia, 2104 – 6303 NW Marine Drive, Vancouver, BC Canada V6T 1Z1. rhanks@alumni.ubc.ca

Visual anthropology

Rebecca Tishler — Mon, 26 Jul 2021 17:16:08 +0000

Jenny Chio

University of Southern California

Initially published 26 Jul 2021

http://doi.org/10.29164/21visual

Abstract:

Visual anthropology encompasses two parallel aims: the production of anthropological media (including ethnographic film, video, photography, drawing, interactive media, etc.) as well as the anthropological analyses of media (including films, videos, photography, drawings, etc.). Conceptually, visual anthropology draws on theoretical and methodological connections between human perception and imagination, the use and production of audiovisual media, and ethnography. This entry explores how the work of visual anthropologists has contested, expanded, and transformed the discipline of anthropology. It also illustrates how the methods and debates in visual anthropology raise critically important questions about authorship, power, and the representation of culture that bear on the work of artists, filmmakers, photographers, curators, and journalists, among many others. The production of audiovisual materials in anthropological research is often overlooked. Yet technological advances in film and audio recording in the mid-twentieth century afforded anthropologists and filmmakers increasing opportunities to incorporate filmmaking into ethnographic and cross-cultural research. Since the 1980s, the establishment of visual anthropology programs within some academic departments, combined with the increased accessibility of video and digital media technologies globally, prompted important critiques of anthropological image-making and image use. It also helped develop new approaches to understanding visual experiences as a cultural practice. Four central concerns of visual anthropology at present are ethnographic filmmaking and theory, Indigenous and activist media, the study of visual culture, and multimodal anthropology. Taken together, this entry shows how visual anthropology has contested, expanded, and transformed understandings of power, authority, and meaning in media-making practices.

Introduction

Visual anthropology includes both producing anthropological media, such as ethnographic films, exhibitions, and photography, as well as analysing existing media as part of anthropological enquiry. Conceptually, visual anthropology lies at the intersection of the study of human perception and imagination, audiovisual media, and ethnography.^[1] The production of ethnographic films, loosely defined as films based upon ethnographic fieldwork, has been the most well-studied aspect of the subfield, although the research and scholarship of visual anthropologists extend well beyond filmmaking.^[2] This entry primarily explores how the work of visual anthropologists has contested, expanded, and transformed the discipline of anthropology. However, it also illustrates how the methods and debates in visual anthropology raise essential questions about authorship, power, and the representation of culture, making the subfield relevant for the work of artists, filmmakers, photographers, curators, and journalists, among many others.

Four themes and areas comprise the central concerns of visual anthropology in the present moment: ethnographic filmmaking and theory, Indigenous and activist media, visual culture, and multimodal anthropology. Even with the wide scope of contemporary visual anthropology that ranges from ethnographic media-making to ethnographies of media, a few common denominators within the subfield exist. First, and most significantly, scholars in this field emphasise that audiovisual recordings and/or visual practices are tools of analysis, rather than merely illustrating text-based analyses. Instead of considering photographs, sound recordings, drawings, or video as supplementary to writing, many visual anthropologists emphasise the complementarity of text and image, where each in turn amplifies the other. For example, some visual anthropologists argue that text need not be the primary mode of communicating ethnographic knowledge for a given project, as is the case for the anthropological biography films of Anna Grimshaw that are focused on the lives of select individuals in a small fishing town in Maine (Grimshaw 2013, 2016). Others show how text and media can work together to amplify anthropological analysis, as in Descending with angels (Suhr 2019) which consists of an ethnographic film as well as a written monograph on Islamic exorscim and psychiatry in Denmark.

A second shared approach defining visual anthropological scholarship is a concern with ethnographic methods and reflexivity; or, in other words, how attention to visual materials and visual practices can make for a more insightful, and more ethical, ethnography. This includes efforts to ‘give back the camera’ and create collaborative modes of filmmaking (see Elder 1995, Moore 1996, Turner 1992, Weiner 1997; also discussed further in the section on Indigenous and activist media) and projects that return historical and fieldwork photographs and films to research communities (see, for example, Strathern 2018 and the film Some Na ceremonies 2015). In these cases, the visual in visual anthropology has afforded anthropologists the opportunity and the responsibility to share research materials and acknowledge the cultural conditions of visual experience. Image-making has also been added to the ethnographer’s toolkit not just for research purposes, but also as a means of giving back to the individuals and communities whose lives and experiences constitute the ‘data’ that makes anthropology possible (Jackson 2004, Lozada 2006). Since anthropological research takes place within global hierarchies of knowledge production, such efforts attempt to ‘question hegemonic Euro/American-centric anthropological and audio-visual aesthetics and epistemologies’ (Flores & Torresan 2018).

Finally, visual anthropology has called into question the limitations of visual representation. The materiality of photographs, the sounds and audioscapes of film and video, the immersive environments of exhibitions, and the interactive possibilities of online platforms push visual anthropologists to look beyond what is obviously visible. Behind this is the recognition that the field of visual anthropology has always included other senses and experiences and that different anthropological questions and different ethnographic contexts may demand, or at least benefit from, different modes of engagement and production. Sensations such as sound and hearing, taste, feel (tactility/hapticity), as well as emotion and affect are all integral to the ways in which human life is experienced, made meaningful, and represented. In 2017, the journal American Anthropologist renamed its long-running ‘Visual Anthropology’ section as ‘Multimodal Anthropologies’ in order to reflect the mixed practices and modes which anthropological scholarship might take. In turn, there have also been numerous initiatives and efforts to change established scholarly practices. Increasing numbers of anthropology programs now accept non-text-based scholarship as part of degree requirements, and more and more discussions have emerged on the evaluation of non-textual scholarship within the discipline (Chio 2017a).

These current concerns about visual analysis, an ethical ethnographic practice, and mixed modes of anthropological knowledge production, are not new. The history of visual anthropology, discussed below, illustrates how technologies and strategies of visual representation are deeply intertwined with the discipline, its theoretical foundations, and its methodological innovations.

Anthropology has always been visual

The history of visual anthropology, and in particular the development of ethnographic filmmaking, is well-studied and illuminates one fundamental truth: anthropology, as a discipline that documents and studies socio-cultural life, has always been invested in the visual (e.g. Banks & Ruby 2011, Grimshaw 2001, El Guindi 2004, Jacknis 2016, Loizos 1995, Ruby 2000).^[3] The production of visual material as a part of anthropological research has occurred since the beginning of the discipline at the turn of the twentieth century. Arguably, the relationship between visual representation and what became known as anthropology emerged with advances in photography from the mid-1800s onwards. Photography was employed extensively in studies of ‘racial types’ within the nascent fields of physical anthropology, which studied the biological evolution and variabilities of humans, and eugenics, a racist pseudo-science that advocated for the selective breeding of human populations. Colonial governments and administrations, in particular, were deeply invested in using photography to classify and categorise colonised populations by racial and ethnic ‘types’ based upon visible, physical characteristics as a means of asserting their authority to rule, govern, and control populations deemed less ‘developed’ than white Anglo-Europeans (Edwards 1994, Pinney 2011). Indeed, state-sponsored practices of using photographs as evidence of racialised differences lasted well into the twentieth century, with grave and violent consequences (see Morris-Reich 2016).

Early anthropologists such as A.C. Haddon, Franz Boas, and E.E. Evans-Pritchard recognised the scholarly significance of audiovisual documentation as a part of ethnographic fieldwork both as a memory aid but also as means of amplifying their research findings. They produced audio recordings, drawings, and photographs during their field research and also included numerous images in their publications (see also Bunn-Marcuse forthcoming, Joseph 2015). A few decades later, Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson experimented with the possibilities of film and photography as a means of anthropological analysis as a part of their fieldwork in Bali (Bateson & Mead 1942, Jacknis 1988). For Mead and Bateson, film and photography allowed for the repeat, more systematic study of human non-verbal behavior and bodily movement through the use of photographic sequences and edited short films, featuring voice-over commentary and analysis.

Technological advances in film and audio recording in the mid-twentieth century afforded anthropologists and filmmakers increasing opportunities for film and photography to play a more central role in ethnographic and cross-cultural research because the actual recording technology was lighter, cheaper, and easier to learn than its predecessors (see Hockings 2003, Collier & Collier 1967). This is exemplified in films like The hunters (1957) and Dead birds (1964) which were produced as part of research expeditions sponsored by Harvard University/Peabody Museum, the films of the Turkana conversations trilogy of David and Judith MacDougall and the Yanomami series of Timothy Asch, as well as the collaborative, shared anthropological films of Jean Rouch, such as Jaguar (1967) and Moi, un Noir (1958) (see also Rouch 2003). Despite the proliferation of ethnographic film during this period, or perhaps precisely because of it, the capacity of film and visual images to communicate anthropological knowledge (or ‘facts’ more generally) emerged as a point of suspicion and anxiety within the discipline. The ‘iconophobia’ of mainstream anthropologists resulted in the marginalisation of the subfield (Taylor 1996; Mead 2003). Whereas text was capable of theory and analysis, the meaning of images was considered less easily controlled and thus more likely to be misunderstood or misinterpreted (MacDougall 1999).

Nevertheless, alongside the rise in global commercial travel and the introduction of more affordable video recording technologies in the 1970s, visual anthropology programs, labs, and centres have been established within a number of academic anthropology departments (see Ruby 2000, 2001). These programs offer more formal research and training opportunities in ethnographic film production, media analysis, and the anthropology of visual culture, although visual anthropology classes are also widely taught in departments without such institutionalised programs. Combined with the ‘writing culture’ debates around power imbalances and representational authority in ethnographic description and analysis, scholarship in visual anthropology has prompted important critiques of anthropological image-making and image use, as well as new anthropological approaches to understanding visual experience as a cultural practice.

Nowadays, it is nearly impossible to imagine conducting ethnographic fieldwork without a camera of some kind, and digital technologies make it possible for nearly every camera to operate in a still or video mode. The global reach of media technologies has also expanded the horizons of visual anthropology, which increasingly overlaps with the subfields of digital anthropology, media anthropology, and sensory anthropology. Furthermore, while the number of visual anthropology degree programs has continued to grow, many more university departments and institutions have laboratory spaces or research groups dedicated to exploring new and re-newed theoretical and methodological potentials of visual and/or media-based scholarship in anthropology. This growth reflects the continued relevance and appeal of visual and other non-text based forms of anthropological work. The revival of interest in the photo-essay, and more broadly the critical use of photographs in anthropological scholarship, is one such recent development in visual anthropology.^[4] Nonetheless, ethnographic film continues to be the most recognisable ‘product’ of the field.

Ethnographic film in practice and as theory

The prominence of ethnographic film in the history of visual anthropology cannot be overstated, despite the fact that photography and sound recordings were also fundamental parts of early ethnographic fieldwork. The history and development of ethnographic film over the twentieth century has also been extensively studied (see, for example, Henley 2020, Loizos 1993), including the connections between ethnographic film and early cinema (especially travelogues) (see Griffiths 2002, Groo 2019), and the parallel development of ethnographic film and documentary film practices and theory (see Grimshaw & Ravetz 2009, Rony 1996). Films made by anthropologists or as part of ethnographic research projects quite literally make visible and more accessible the work of anthropology, from the process of fieldwork to the analysis of cultural values, beliefs, and behaviours. Moreover, with its combination of sound and moving image, the film medium can be regarded as more akin to lived experience, more immediately apprehensible, and more capable of communicating anthropological insights to a broader public.

Comprehensive accounts by and analyses of various influential ethnographic filmmakers have been published (Grimshaw 2001, MacDonald 2013, MacDougall 1999 and 2006, Rouch 2003, Ruby 2000). Among the many oft-cited ethnographic filmmakers includes Margaret Mead, who sought to harness the pedagogical, scientific, and public-facing possibilities of the film medium. For Mead, film was a way to show and analyze human cultural lives in ways that text could not, although her films relied heavily upon intertitles and didactic voice-overs to interpret the filmed materials for viewers (see Trance and dance in Bali [1952]). Later, Jean Rouch, working in France and postcolonial West Africa, upended the expectation that an ethnographic film necessarily had to record ‘real life’ in front of the camera in favor of what he called a ‘shared anthropology’ (Rouch 2003). In films such as Jaguar (1967) and Moi, un Noir (1958) which explored migrant youth experiences and masculinity, Rouch worked collaboratively with long-term friends and interlocutors, producing ‘ethno-fictional’ films composed of pre-planned scenes coupled with voice-over narrations added during post-production. The resulting films are both fictional, in that they are not direct recordings of an event or experience, and ethnographic, in that they explore and reflect socio-cultural lives, belief systems, and values.

Other key figures in ethnographic film history include John Marshall for his films on the lives and experiences of Ju/'hoansi of southern Africa (present-day Namibia), beginning with The hunters (1957) and up to the five-part A Kalahari family series (2002). Marshall’s many films on Ju/’hoansi began as part of research programs intended to ‘document’ a hunter-gatherer society that was presumed to be ‘disappearing’ in the modern era, and led to his continued advocacy with Ju/’hoansi and !Kung for the next half-century (see Anderson & Benson 1993). The films of Robert Gardner, whose early work was also conducted as part of research expeditions, reflect and challenge the capacity of film to communicate anthropological arguments (Gardner 2008). Dead birds (1964) utilised many formal elements associated with anthropological filmmaking at the time (explanatory voice-over and a focus on a so-called ‘primitive’ society), although the film addressed the more universal subject of human warfare and violence. However, by the time Gardner made Forest of bliss in 1986, he plunged viewers into the Indian city of Benares and local patterns of worship and religious experience without any explanatory text or narration, thus leaving the ‘meaning’ of the film ostensibly open to viewer interpretation (though of course the film was deliberately and carefully edited).

The stylistic and formal differences between Gardner’s Dead birds and Forest of bliss represent a broader formal development in ethnographic film in the second half of the twentieth century. While many ethnographic films from the 1950s through to the 1970s tended to rely upon voice-over narration to explain or describe film sequences, an observational mode of ethnographic filmmaking gradually came to dominate the aesthetic and formal style of ethnographic film today (see Grimshaw & Ravetz 2009, Henley 2020). Known as ‘observational cinema’, it reflects a perspective on social and cultural lives, emphasising an ‘unprivileged camera style’ (MacDougall 1982), where the filmmaker and the camera’s presence are a part of (but not dominant in) the filmed encounter. What is presented should, to the best extent possible, reflect what one could actually experience in a particular socio-cultural context.^[5]Formally, this meant eschewing voice-over narrations and montage editing, and relying on long takes that reflect the pace of life and conversation as it unfolds. David and Judith MacDougall were among the first ethnographic filmmakers to utilise subtitles in their films and thus ‘give voice’ directly to the film’s characters (see MacDougall 1995); their Turkana conversations trilogy films from the 1970s are widely regarded as embodying the concept and practice of observational cinema.

The approach and aesthetic of observational cinema continues to largely define ethnographic filmmaking at present, albeit with slight differences in styles and techniques. This formal ‘style’ of ethnographic film, the ways in which ethnographic observation can be represented in and through film, and the power dynamics alternately revealed and obscured by formal choices in filmmaking continue to constitute central issues in ethnographic film theory (MacDougall 1999, Grimshaw 2001 and 2009, Suhr & Willerslev 2012). Since the early 2000s, some of the most widely discussed films within and beyond anthropology have been produced by scholars and students affiliated with the Sensory Ethnography Lab (SEL) at Harvard University.^[6] An attention to sound (spoken and ambient), sequence and temporality (especially the long take), and image composition characterise these films (see Nakamura 2013, Lee 2019). Films such as Leviathan (2012), Manakamana (2014), and Demolition/Chaiqian (2008) have prompted much-needed discussions within anthropology on the question of aesthetics, ethics, and representations of other lives (human and non-human) (on Leviathan, see the special issue of Visual Anthropology Review 31(1); also Spray 2020 and Sniadecki 2014). Taken together, what can be called the contemporary ‘observational-sensory’ convention of ethnographic film-making reveals an unease with the limits and possibilities of ethnographic film to both convey cultural experiences and to respect (and reflect) cultural differences (Chio 2020).

Even more important for the future of visual anthropology, increasing numbers of anthropologists now engage in filmmaking as a means of presenting knowledge to broader publics, including to research communities. They push the possibilities of film as a mode of ethnographic inquiry while also offering a much-needed expansion and diversification of the ethnographic film ‘canon’. Anthropologist-filmmakers such as Harjant Gill, Anna Grimshaw, Lina Fruzzetti and Ákös Öster, Hu Tai-Li, Karen Nakamura, and Deborah Thomas and John Jackson, Jr., among many others, have produced ethnographic films that formally range from the more ‘purely’ observational (Seed and earth [1995], At low tide [2016]) to more interview-driven (Mardistan [2014], Bad friday [2011]). One commonality across many recent ethnographic films is the self-conscious filmmaker, whose presence or absence is posited as a deliberate and meaningful choice to yield the cinematic space to the film’s subjects and their experiences/expertise (see Grimshaw’s four-part series, Mr. Coperthwaite: a life in the Maine woods [2013]) or to emphasise the role of the anthropologist in unraveling and motivating the encounters thusly filmed (see Death by myth [2002], the final film in Marshall’s A Kalahari family series; Coffee futures [2009]). Frequently, the anthropologist-filmmaker is positioned somewhere in between these poles – acknowledging her/his place within the film through carefully chosen moments of direct address (see 农家乐 Peasant family happiness [2013]).

In addition to internal debates over ethnography and the use-value of film, advances in relatively more affordable video technologies and a growing interest from mainstream media networks in cross-cultural issues and documentary film (see Grimshaw 2001, Henley 2020) mean that the ethics, power dynamics, and reception of ethnographic films have been increasingly questioned. Experimental filmmakers such as Chick Strand, Maya Deren, and Trinh T. Minh-ha revisited documentary assumptions, ethnographic film aesthetics, and anthropological authority in their works. Their films pose searing critiques of cross-cultural representation and the ways in which documentary filmmaking has reinforced oppressive hierarchies of power and knowledge (see Ramey 2011, Rony 1996, Russell 1999, and Suhr & Willerslev 2013). Another key factor that has shaped visual anthropology since the 1980s has been the widespread movement to engage in more collaborative research and analysis. As discussed in the following section, the rise and recognition of Indigenous and activist media productions around the globe have prompted new research directions and new forms of critique, collaboration, and reflexivity.

The parallax effect: Indigenous and activist media

Concerns between ethnographic film and media practices by Indigenous, minoritised, and other cultural activist communities tend to converge, though not necessarily in agreement, around questions of power, cultural identity, and colonial/post-colonial conditions. This has been succinctly described by Faye Ginsburg (1995) in her influential concept of the ‘parallax effect’. For Ginsburg, the parallax effect suggests that while both ethnographic film and Indigenous media are cinematic representations of culture, Indigenous media offers ‘slightly different angles of vision’. Namely, while the ostensible subject of the films may be the same (Indigenous or other non-majority cultural lives), the perspectives offered diverge, often dramatically, between what can be simplified as an ‘outside’ (or etic) approach by ethnographers and an ‘inside’ (emic) view from the community or an individual within the community thusly represented. When considered together, Ginsburg argues, the effect can be a ‘fuller comprehension of the complexity of the social phenomenon we call culture and those media representations that self-consciously engage with it’ (1995: 65). The concept of a ‘parallax effect’ is grounded in earlier debates on the ‘crisis of representation’ in anthropology broadly, as well as calls for ethnographic film and filmmakers to acknowledge and yield authorial power to the voices of those who are more typically the subjects of film, rather than the creators (see Chen 1992, Ginsburg 1994, Nichols 1994, Weinberger 1994, Weiner 1997).

Indigenous media in particular has pushed scholarship in visual anthropology to confront the imbalance of power between the filmmaker and the ‘filmed’ and to concede some authorial control over the creation and content of media. It includes any and all ‘forms of media expression conceptualized, produced, and circulated by Indigenous peoples around the globe as vehicles for communication’ (Wilson, Hearn, Córdova & Thorner 2014). Projects to ‘give the camera back,’ including Through Navajo eyes (Worth & Adair 1972), Video nas Aldeias (Carelli 1988), and the Kayapo video project (Turner 1992), provide equipment and basic training to Indigenous individuals without delineating a particular product or goal beyond what participants themselves deem important or significant. Such earlier efforts were subject to critique, however, because regardless of good intentions, questions of power, authority, and control permeate throughout any media-making endeavor, beginning with the provision of resources (cameras, editing suites, microphones, and time to participate in training) to the distribution of the productions (networking with television stations and film festivals, storage requirements, and so on) (see Moore 1996).^[7]

Nowadays, Indigenous media ranges from national television broadcast programs to radio, experimental arts, documentaries, and narrative film. They are united by a commitment to representing the experiences, perspectives, and values of Indigenous communities from their points of view, rather than from that of dominant, mainstream society. Assertions of political self-determination, sovereignty, and cultural preservation tend to be at the forefront of much Indigenous media (e.g. Angry Inuk [2016]), although these are by no means prescriptive or absolute limits on the possible diversity of themes and topics that they can and do address (Aufderheide 2008, Ginsburg 2016, Wilson & Stewart 2008). Visual anthropologists, Indigenous and non-Indigenous, have been involved and engaged with Indigenous media ethnographically by studying Indigenous media productions, from visual arts (Mithlo 2009, Myers 2002, Hennessy, Smith & Hogue 2018) to radio (Fisher & Bessire 2012) to film (Dowell 2017), but also professionally, for example as consultants for television programming (Deger 2006, Michaels 1991 and 1993) and as curators (see, for example, Mithlo's curatorial work at the Venice Biennale). Recent collaborations between anthropologists and Indigenous media makers, such as Miyarrka Media (2019), the Karrabing Film Collective (Lea & Povinelli 2018), and a forthcoming digital publication that reassesses Kwakiutl films and audio recordings made with Franz Boas (Bunn-Marcuse), emphasise a more equal foundation for media-making in an increasingly media-saturated world.

Activist media by minoritised, oppressed, and marginalised communities have further amplified the need to confront the often unquestioned, or under-addressed, ‘authority’ of mainstream media practioners, scholars, artists, and global political elites to depict and represent ‘other’ cultural lives. Scholarship on activist media, in turn, offers a much-needed challenge to reconsider and reshape media practice by confronting, head on, how media representations are a means of political control and potential resistance (see Osman 2019 on the interpellation of African Americans, Muslims, and Muslim Americans in US media in the post-9/11 era). Autoethnography, which adopts a deliberately self-concious and personal perspective on social conditions, has been an especially powerful mode of activist media-making (for example, see Russell 1999 on autoethnographic queer films and queer filmmaker networks in the United States). Autoethnographic films by anthropologists, such as Postcards from Tora Bora (Dolak & Osman 2007) about a young Afghan-American woman’s return to her childhood home two decades after fleeing Afghanistan with her family, and In my mother’s house (Fruzzetti & Östör 2017), tracing a personal journey through a matrix of Eritrean, Italian, and American colonial and post-colonial kin relations, further demonstrate the possibilities of a self-reflexively active, if not explicitly activist, approach. Taken together, Indigenous and activist media have freed visual anthropology, and ethnographic film in particular, from the confines of representing a fixed, or observable, cultural ‘reality’ in favor of exploring the possibilities of film and media practice for understanding and questioning social, cultural, and political conditions.

An anthropology of the visual

The analytical approaches taken by visual anthropologists towards Indigenous and activist media make clear the doubled ambitions of the subfield: to communicate anthropological knowledge through visual and other non-textual media as well as to engage in anthropological analyses of the visual world, including bodily gestures, visual practices, and different forms of media (for example, see Banks & Morphy 1997). The anthropology of the visual shares broad concerns with the emergence of visual culture studies and the ‘visual turn’ in the humanities (Jay 2002, Mitchell 2005). These emphasise how visual practices and visual media circulate and create meaning within culturally specific contexts.

As noted earlier, the deeply intertwined relationship between photography and the development of anthropology from the late 1800s to the present has been one of the most significant ‘cultural contexts’ studied. The history of photography in anthropology illuminates the critical theoretical work of visual anthropologists in understanding photography, and how the specific qualities of the photographic medium as still images with a specific materiality, and distinct photographic genres such as portraiture, convey meaning. At the same time, photographs have shaped the discipline and its core assumptions and concepts (Edwards 1994 and 2001, Pinney 2011). They have served as evidence of anthropological insights and concepts, as in Mead and Bateson’s Balinese character (1942) discussed earlier; likewise, photography functioned as a medium of power and a means of questioning power relations in anthropology (Edwards 2011). Both photo-elicitation and participatory photography are methodological interventions that have been adopted by visual anthropologists in order to address historical and existing power dynamics within the ethnographic encounter and also to explore the processes through which individuals make meaning out of and from visual representations (see Bowles 2017, Fattal 2020).

Ethnographies of photography situate photographs within specific histories and conditions of image production and circulation. Significant, for visual anthropology, is the close attention to the visual image as a material object in the world that leads to specific material practices. Insofar as photographs exist on paper, on hand-held screens, or otherwise they are not just as ‘representations of’ an assumedly more real reality elsewhere (Pinney 2011, Pinney & Peterson 2003, Wright 2013). Methodologically, the ethnography of photography requires the work of ‘visual detection’ (Gürsel 2018) and a practical as well as theoretical perspective on how particular kinds of photographs are made. For example, Brent Luvaas (2016 and 2019) ethnographically analyzes the production, aesthetisation, and creation of ‘street style’ fashion photography both on the ground as a photographic practice and online as genre of (commercially valuable) social media. Zeynep Gürsel, exploring how editorial newsrooms select news photographs, has called this process ‘formative fictions’ because the editorial process itself is where social meaning is created and communicated (2016). Similarly, Rebecca Carter (2019) analyzed the news circulation of a photograph of her family’s home as it was burning in the wake of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans. Studies of studio portraiture especially have revealed how photography has been valued and productively deployed in imagining social status and belonging (see Banfill 2020, Sprague 1978a and 1978b). Portraiture, whether photographic or painted, commissioned or literally taken in the case of early anthropometric photography, provides a wide arena for reconsidering representation and the power of the image in assertions of agency (see Buggenhagen 2017 on post-colonial portraits by Senegalese artist Omar Victor Diop).

Although photography occupies a significant place within the anthropology of the visual, visual images as they exist and are seen in the world today surpass it. Focusing on these images in general addresses the image-saturated condition of the contemporary moment and the nature of ‘image-events’ (Strassler 2020). As a political process, Karen Strassler posits, image-events acknowledge how images can become central to political and social contestations in public and across different publics. Images of all kinds are active agents in shaping society and social expectations, as Arlene Dávila (2012 and 2020) has shown in her studies of Latinx marketing, media, and art. This focus on visuality, or taking the visual as an analytic, allows for an anthropology of the visual that can look beyond the making of representations and towards the ways in which representations in turn shape lived experiences (see, for example, Chio 2014 and 2017b on the visual expediencies of rural ethnic tourism in China).

The theoretical and thematic overlaps between scholarship in the anthropology of the visual, media anthropology, and visual culture are indicative of how multi-layered visual media really are. Any single image, whether a photograph, a drawing, a film still, or a digital rendering, can now be relatively easily printed, stored, digitised, animated, shared, and so on, making it ever more difficult and important to critically examine disciplinary assumptions about what images mean and whether and how the medium itself may be the message (following McLuhan 1994 [1964]). The anthropology of the visual also underpins and buttresses calls within visual anthropology to take medium specificity more seriously and to consider the wide array of possible media for the communication of anthropological and ethnographic knowledge.

From visual to multimodal?

In recent years, the term ‘multimodal anthropology’ has emerged alongside the term visual anthropology. The argument for ‘multimodal anthropology’ is to reflect changes in the media ecology and to acknowledge the diversity of media long employed by anthropologists (Collins, Durington & Gill 2017: 142). One central impetus for the wider adoption of ‘multimodal’ to describe non-text scholarship by anthropologists is the fact that ‘visual’ as a term is limiting and not entirely accurate when describing the vast scope of genres and media utilised by anthropologists. Films and videos, most obviously, incorporate careful and deliberate soundtracks, whether spoken, musical, or ambient; photographs are images and material objects; sound and sonic experiences themselves constitute particular ways of encountering and understanding (see Feld 2012, Phillips & Vidali 2017); performance, from dance to theatre to improvisational, have all been utilised and theorised by anthropologists as a scholarly form of knowledge communication (Kondo 2018). The term ‘sensory ethnography’ has also been used to capture some of these dynamics, whether through film and sound work (as in the Sensory Ethnography Lab) or through ethnographies of sensory experience (Howes 2019, Pink 2015). Multimodal anthropology, more broadly, asserts the possibility to reinvent anthropology itself, by foregrounding the ‘multiple ways of doing anthropology that create different ways of knowing and learning together’ (Dattatreyan & Marrero-Guillamón 2019: 220).

This recent attention to multimodality in anthropology can, in part, be traced to the ‘ethnographic turn’ in contemporary art practice (Foster 1995, Grimshaw & Ravetz 2015, Rutten, van Diederen & Soetaert 2013, Takaragawa & Halloran 2017). In fact, artists share many of the concerns of anthropologists over the politics, ethics, and poetics involved in multiple media. For example, Ethnographic Terminalia, a curatorial collective that organised annual exhibition programs alongside the annual meetings of the American Anthropological Association from 2009-2019, staged installations that deliberately combined works from anthropologists and artists to interrogate key conceptual and theoretical intersections. Annual themes included communities of practice (2011), memory and the archive (2014), and the past and future of the photo-essay (2016). WakandaAAA University, a project aiming to build ‘an ethno-future space beyond whiteness that challenges anthropology from the ground up’, appeared for the second time in 2019 as a part of the final Ethnographic Terminalia. Featuring open spaces and scheduled events, including a 'cyborg sandbox', a virtual reality gallery, and a silent rave, the project advocated for, in its own words, ‘Down with heroes and their narratives. Up with genre-busting and serious play’.^[8]

The effect of the move towards multimodal anthropology has not only been the acknowledgement and creation of different forms of anthropological scholarship. More importantly, anthropologists are challenged to imagine a multitude of possible anthropologies, to experiment with the methods and practice of ethnography, and to look beyond other anthropologists for inspiration and direction.^[9]Of course, this is not to say that multimodal anthropology, as a concept, is without its own blinders and assumptions. Just as visual anthropology has often been equated with the production of ethnographic film, multimodal anthropology is frequently associated with the use of digital media as a supposedly more accessible and democratic mode of engagement. But ‘[t]here is nothing inherently liberatory about multimodal approaches in anthropology’ (Takaragawa et al. 2019: 517). After all, earlier research showed clearly that ethnographic films often reinforced stereotypes among audiences, instead of challenging or dismantling them (Martinez 1995). Likewise, the uptake of digital or multimedia technologies is not, in itself, transformative. Rather, as Stephanie Takaragawa et al. argue:

as our discipline(s) increasingly advocates for the multimodal in the service of anthropology, there is a need for deep engagement with the multimodal’s position as an expression of technoscientific praxis, which is complicit in the reproduction of power hierarchies in the context of global capitalism, 'capital accumulation' (Collins, Durington & Gill 2017: 144), and other forms of oppression (2019: 517).

The conversation around multimodal anthropology has continued to press anthropology, writ large, to take account of and interrogate its own structures of status, hierarchy, and privilege in what ‘counts’ as scholarship. More importantly and more widely, multimodal anthropology has the potential to expand the tools and theories at hand for engaging in cross-cultural research, analysis, and representational projects. This discussion is rooted in the very nature of the work of visual anthropology, which from its very beginnings has been committed to the search for more compelling means of communicating the insights of ethnography.

Conclusion: visual experiences and visual experiments

In a way, visual anthropology as a separate subfield is arguably no longer needed. The number of ethnographic film festivals globally continues to increase, not decrease. Related subfields of media anthropology, digital anthropology, and multimodal anthropology seem to encompass much of what used to be considered the analytical terrain of the visual. If anything, however, these developments underpin the ongoing influence and importance of visual anthropology. From early efforts in ethnographic filmmaking to the self-critique brought about by Indigenous media to the desire to work differently embodied in the calls for multimodality, visual anthropology has always been concerned with the ethics and epistemology of ethnography and theory building.

The proliferation of image-making and image-sharing technologies in the world today thus circles back to a fundamental question: how might all of these different ways of doing research and analysis make for better anthropology? And who gets to decide what is better, or what needs improving, in the first place? Clearly there are no firm or final answers to these broad questions, which by necessity should return time and time again. What visual anthropology has done and must continue to do is to carve out space for scholars, artists, and activists to learn from the visual experiences of others and to open themselves to visual experiments of their own.

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Films and Videos Cited

Archei, O., T. Blumenfield & R. Duoji 2015. Some Na ceremonies. Berkeley: Berkeley Media, 31 minutes, digital video.

Arnaquq-Baril, A. 2016. Angry Inuk. National Film Board of Canada, 85 minutes, digital video.

Asch, T. 1968-1976. Yanomami series (22 films). Watertown, Mass.: Documentary Educational Resources, 428 minutes, film.

Castaing-Taylor, L. & V. Páravel 2013. Leviathan. New York: Cinema Guild, 87 minutes, digital video.

Chio, J. 2013. 农家乐 Peasant family happiness. Berkeley: Berkeley Media, 71 minutes, digital video.

Dolak, K. & W. Osman 2007. Postcards from Tora Bora. Watertown, Mass.: Documentary Education Resources, 82 minutes, digital video.

Fattal, A. 2009. Trees Tropiques. Berkeley: Berkeley Media, 30 minutes, digital video.

Fruzzetti, L. & Á. Öster 1995. Seed and earth. Watertown, Mass.: Documentary Educational Resources, 36 minutes, film.

——— 2016. In my mother’s house: tracing a family history from Italy to Eritrea. Watertown, Mass.: Documentary Education Resources. 82 minutes, digital video.

Gardner, R. 1986. Forest of bliss. Watertown, Mass.: Documentary Educational Resources, 90 minutes, film.

——— 1964. Dead birds. Watertown, Mass.: Documentary Educational Resources, 83 minutes, film.

Gill, H. 2014. Mardistan (Macholand). Washington D.C.: Tilotama Productions, 30 minutes, digital video. (available online: https://vimeo.com/120182667, accessed 31 August 2020).

Grimshaw, A. 2016. George’s place: the cellar. 83 minutes, digital video.

——— 2016. At low tide. London: Royal Anthropological Institute, 63 minutes, digital video.

——— 2013. Mr Coperthwaite: a life in the Maine Woods (including Spring in Dickinson’s Reach [83 mins), A summer task [47 mins], Autumn’s work [47 mins]; Winter days [59 mins]). Berkeley: Berkeley Media and London: Royal Anthropological Institute, digital video.

Gürsel, Z.D. 2009. Coffee futures. Watertown, Mass.: Documentary Educational Resources, 22 minutes, digital video.

MacDougall, D. & J. MacDougall. Turkana conversations trilogy (including Lorang’s way [1980, 70 minutes], The wedding camels [1980, 108 minutes], and A wife among wives [1982, 72 minutes]). Berkeley: Berkeley Media, film.

Marshall, J. (dir.) 1957. The hunters. Watertown, Mass.: Documentary Educational Resources, 72 minutes, film.

——— 2002. A Kalahari family (!Kung series). Watertown, Mass.: Documentary Educational Resources, 360 minutes, film and video.

Mead, M. (dir.) 1952. Trance and dance in Bali. Library of Congress, 22 minutes, film (available on-line: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z8YC0dnj4Jw). Accessed 31 August 2020.

Rouch, J. 1958. Moi, un Noir. New York: Icarus Films, 70 minutes, film.

——— 1967. Jaguar. New York: Icarus Films, 88 minutes, film.

Sniadecki, J.P. 2008. Demolition/Chaiqian. New York: Cinema Guild, 62 minutes, digital video.

Spray, S. & P. Velez 2014. Manakamana. New York: Cinema Guild, 118 minutes, film.

Thomas, D., J. Jackson Jr. & J.G. Wedderburn 2011. Bad friday: Rastafari after Coral Gardens. New York: Third World Newsreel, 63 minutes, video.

Note on contributor

Jenny Chio is Associate Professor at the University of Southern California. Her ethnographic film, 农家乐Peasant family happiness (2013), examines ethnic tourism in rural China. She has served as co-editor of the journal Visual Anthropology Review and co-director of the Society for Visual Anthropology Film and Media Festival.

Jenny Chio, Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures, 3501 Trousdale Pkwy, Taper Hall 356, University of Southern California, Los Angeles CA 90089-0357. jchio@usc.edu

Image credit

Nuosu college students pose in vintage clothing, creating a retro aesthetic. Chengdu, China. See also Banfill 2020. Photo by Kaitlin Banfill, 2018. Used with permission.

[1] Visual anthropology encompasses more than just the visual, as this entry will elaborate, and when referring to films and video it is more precise to use the term ‘audiovisual’. For consistency, in this entry I mostly use the more widely employed moniker of 'visual anthropology'.

[2] ‘Ethnographic film’ as a genre has been notoriously difficult to define because it has been used to describe both films by anthropologists and ethnographers as well as films about topics and concepts central to anthropology; see Chio 2020, Durrington 2013, Friedman 2017, Vannini 2020, Crawford & Turton 1993, Barbash & Taylor 1996.

[3] Anthropological research and writing has also depended upon other senses, especially listening/hearing. However, visual representations, in the form of photographs or museum exhibitions/object displays, have been more widely discussed and theorised.

[4] Publishing initiatives, such as The Page in Visual Anthropology Review and Writing with Light in Cultural Anthropology, aimed to foster contemporary critical conversations around the photo-essay as a mode of anthropological inquiry.

[5] The phrase ‘observational cinema’ is attributed to the filmmaker Colin Young, who established the Ethnographic Film Unit at the University of California Los Angeles in the 1960s and trained a generation of anthropological filmmakers, including David and Judith MacDougall whose films and publications are widely considered exemplars of this mode of filmmaking (see Henley 2018).

[6] Many other well-known programs train students in ethnographic filmmaking, including the long-running Center for Visual Anthropology at the University of Southern California, the Culture + Media program at New York University, and the Granada Center for Visual Anthropology at the University of Manchester.

[7] David MacDougall offered his reflections on a participatory media project he was a part of in Aboriginal Australia, stating ‘... in a sense it was a kind of idealisation, perhaps, of a notion of solidarity between Aboriginal people and sympathetic Whites. My view of it now is that it was a kind of film-making that rather confused the issues. In those films one never really knows quite who’s speaking for whom, and whose interests are being expressed. It is not clear what in the film is coming from us and what is coming from them ... it’s a slightly uncomfortable marriage of interests that masks a lot of issues’ (quoted in Grimshaw & Papastergiadis 1995: 44-5).

[8] WakandaAAA University (available online: https://wakandaaaa.home.blog/, accessed 29 August 2020).

[9] See, for example, the research, teaching, and events of the Center for Experimental Ethnography at the University of Pennsylvania.

Sharing

Rebecca Tishler — Wed, 28 Apr 2021 17:07:51 +0000

Thomas Widlok

University of Cologne

Initially published 28 Apr 2021

http://doi.org/10.29164/21sharing

Abstract:

Sharing is a particularly versatile and widespread human practice that features in all domains of life, including religion and politics, family life, and economics. It has a long ethnographic record but it is only recently that it has reached centre stage in social theory and in public awareness. However, not everything that is called ‘sharing’ qualifies as such in a comparative and more technical sense. This entry seeks to distinguish sharing from other transfers, such as alms- and gift-giving, resource pooling, and redistribution. Sharing is here defined as ‘allowing others to access what is valued’, an activity that is not necessarily initiated or desired by the person who gives. Sharing can help humans solve problems of resource distribution, but it may also generate problems that require culturally specific answers: What can or should be shared, with whom and under which conditions? What are the social prerequisites and the social implications of sharing? This entry presents some comparative cases of sharing found across the world and looks at how sharing is also a means to level differences and to prevent the accumulation of wealth and power. It equally considers the current inflational use of the label ‘sharing’ and on-going attempts to establish alternative forms of economic transfers in the so-called ‘sharing economy’.

Introduction: the currency of sharing

Not everything that is called ‘sharing’ actually constitutes sharing in practice. When you use a ‘car-sharing’ system, for example, you may in fact be renting a car part-time, as this involves a straightforward rental contract with a company in return for a monthly fee or charges incurred per kilometre driven. This may therefore be a market transaction, akin to buying and selling. The company may want to call it ‘sharing’, as the term has positive connotations in the urban West where it is associated with saving resources and with giving you a sense of being engaged in a morally right activity. However, this may just be part of marketing discourse in what is otherwise a competitive commercial set-up. At the same time, you may have given your colleague or neighbour a lift in that rented car. Was that sharing, even though you may not have thought or talked about it that way? Or was it rather like a gift, if the other person now feels obliged to give you some sort of return at a later stage? And although you have not met the previous person renting this car, driving a car from a ‘car-share company’ may not feel like having a car exclusively to yourself, since you have sat in the same seat, touched the same steering wheel, and breathed more or less the same air as other users. So, was that part of it sharing, or was it something more like ‘pooling’, i.e. using a common property or infrastructure?

Questions such as these illustrate that anthropological analyses of sharing need to go beyond what people may call ‘sharing’ to distinguish different modes of transfers according to the difference they make with regard to the social relationships involved. This is what this entry on sharing focuses on: How can we distinguish sharing from similar but different transfers on the basis of their capacity to change our social relations? And how constitutive are these modes of transfer for our sociality? Many definitions of sharing tend to focus on the objects that are being transferred, so that sharing is seen above all as a means of distribution. This entry, by contrast, focuses on the social implications of sharing by defining sharing technically as practices of ‘extending the circle of people who have access to what is valued’ (see Widlok 2017: xvii). The three elements of this definition will be discussed in turn, firstly the question of ‘what is valued’, secondly the interplay of ‘gaining access’, ‘demanding access’, and ‘granting access’ that constitute sharing as access, and thirdly the question of how exactly and how far the circle can be extended, especially in the growing platform economics.

Given the ubiquity of sharing today, it may be somewhat surprising that it has only recently gained prominence in social theory. This is largely because many other approaches have subsumed sharing under various other labels: Influential has been Marshall Sahlins’ formulation that sharing is a form of ‘reciprocity’ (1988), hence closely related to gift-giving, and fusing sharing with other forms of redistribution (Polanyi 1944) or pooling (Price 1975). Later definitions, by contrast, highlighted that sharing was often ‘uni-directional’ (Hunt 2000) and that it did not have the contest-like quality of gift-giving, which also goes with careful account-keeping that is considered offensive in most sharing contexts (Graeber 2011: 99). While gift-giving can be explained as a strategy for creating dependency, obligation, and status accumulation for the giver, the same explanation does not hold for sharing practices. This intrigued evolutionary scholars who sought to explain sharing with reference to its evolutionary utility even though it seemed to benefit the survival of others rather than of oneself. Evolutionary approaches focus on the function of sharing to create a social resource buffer for lean times, as a risk-reducing strategy (Ichikawa 2005), and on its ‘costly signalling’ function, i.e. signalling to potential partners that we share and therefore care for others.

The growing interest in sharing today is at least partly due to the fact that it is considered a very promising candidate when exploring alternatives to the dominant modes of commercial, extractive, and exploitative economising. This makes sharing an anthropological concern not only for its role in human evolutionary past (see Kelly [2013] for this issue, which is beyond this entry) but also in terms of the transformation of the current and future political and economic order. The currency of sharing, as we shall see, lies not only in its redistributive capacity but also in its social challenges. Anthropologists are adamant in pointing out that much of what today is called ‘sharing’ in the more appropriately named ‘crowd-based’ or ‘platform-based’ economy may not be sharing at all. However, even the misnomers have helped to put sharing, as a practice, back on the research agenda. It took considerable time to understand the change brought about by the rise of capitalism and the extension of markets and commodity logics to all spheres of life in the ‘great transformation’ (Polanyi 1944). Today the claim that after the collapse of communism ‘there is no alternative’ to the capitalist market economy has sparked a new interest in exploring the full repertoire of transfer modes that humans have at their disposal.

Sharing and value

The main anthropological problem with sharing is not that it is a rare or somehow ‘exotic’ practice that we are unfamiliar with. Rather, it is ubiquitous and everyone has experienced it. In that, it is different from other human practices that work for some groups but are strange for others. For instance, think of living with several partners, marrying your cousin, moving around nomadically, organising social order without a centralised government, making a living outside capitalist production, and so forth. In these cases, anthropology has had the function of making the seemingly strange familiar, for a long time with a European bias defining what needed ‘de-exoticising’. But not everything cultural is peculiar in this way, and sharing is a case in point. Here, the role of anthropology is to make the mundane intriguing to us so that we can take a fresh comparative look at what seems familiar and unproblematic. With regard to sharing, this means to make sure that we do not mistake the rather peculiar notion of sharing, that we may hold as a result of our own cultural upbringing, with sharing as it emerges across a diversity of human contexts. A common bias that arises from living a particular way of life that we label ‘modern’ is to think of sharing as something that is only done with a few very close relatives, an altruistic exception in an otherwise selfish existence. Moreover, the dominant evaluation of sharing is in many ways disparate: On the one hand, there is a romantic yearning towards sharing as something that should be done, but often is not (or no longer). Alternatively, sharing is despised as something bad or backward that needs to be overcome. In Australia, for example, the government has tried for a long time to organise welfare payments to indigenous Australians in a way that they prevent recipients from sharing ‘too much’. Demand sharing in particular has been targeted as a root problem by state administrators intervening in Aboriginal communities (Altman 2011: 196).

Groups that practice frequent and wide-ranging sharing are subject to this bifurcated preconception, being romanticised and discriminated against. I have encountered this frequently in field research with present-day hunter-gatherers under processes of change (see Widlok 1999, 2020). Nearby farm owners, government officials, and agro-pastoralist neighbours in many of these instances feel that hunter-gatherers have to abandon sharing in order to more effectively accumulate property and adopt a market- and investment-oriented way of economising. Sharing is considered an obstacle in that process. For instance, farm workers in Namibia who used to be hunter-gatherers and who tend to be lumped together under the ethnic label San, have been encouraged by colonial bosses to save up some of their salaries so that they could buy individual property items such as bicycles, cars, or houses (Widlok 1999: 123). The social pressures of sharing their income widely, in this view, prevents the ‘uplifting’ of San to mainstream culture. This has many parallels in the ways in which the landed gentry in Europe looked down on proletarians who lived in permeable domestic units, spending and sharing space and income rather than accumulating and insulating within families. It also has parallels with the concerns of middle-class parents who see the youth as ‘oversharing’ in the social media, by which they mean ‘disclosing too much of oneself in public’ (see Widlok 2017: 165).

In my field research I often encountered doctors and development workers who kept cautioning the San and other hunter-gatherers not to share their tobacco pipes, drinking vessels, and sexual partners since this increases the danger of contracting contagious diseases. In the Covid-19 pandemic, again the dangers of sharing are being invoked, not limited to sharing (bodily) fluids but more generally to sharing the same space, even breathing the same air. The dominant view amongst those who have become unfamiliar with sharing is to delimit it rigidly. By contrast, among skilled and frequent practitioners, sharing tends to operate without rigid adherence to abstract principles of altruism, alms giving, or narrow kin support. It is often more open than that, and can be broadened but also at times narrowed. This raises questions, such as: Under which conditions may it be considered desirable to share? What are the limits and affordances of sharing? And how are these limits and opportunities culturally constructed and socially enforced?

Comparative studies across a variety of societies show that sharing regularly goes beyond individual households, and that repeated food crises lead humans to share more frequently but not automatically more widely (see Ember et al. 2018). When trying to answer the above questions properly, we therefore need to turn to individual cases studies. These are often taken from the ethnography of current and former hunter-gatherers around the world. This is not because the phenomena observed were limited to these societies but rather because theoretically interesting features were observed in these contexts that question recurring cultural preconceptions. For instance, the prevalent romantic but misleading idea that sharing is either a result of pure altruism or pure necessity has been put into question by observations made in Aboriginal Australia. The biased view includes the assumption that if you have at times too much of a certain item, you share it in order not to waste it. However, there is a different lesson that Fred Myers (1988) was taught by a Australian Aboriginal Pintupi man called Jimmy, which is mirrored in many ethnographic contexts: Sharing is not simply the consequence of economic needs and the ecological distribution of resources but rather it is instrumental in producing the underlying social conditions in the first place. It typically does not target what people are happy to give away anyway, but rather what they value and would like to keep. Jimmy asked Fred for cigarettes to be shared even though he did have some himself – which he, in the end, gave to Fred when he found out the anthropologist had given all of his cigarettes away already.

He also taught Fred to make sure to hide some of his resources so that he can dodge the constant demands and requests to share. In Aboriginal Australia, as in many contexts among (former) hunter-gatherers, sharing and demands do not contradict one another. Moreover, demands can take the form of accepted and conventionalised prompts that initiate sharing, but they can also take the problematic form of constant nagging and out-of-proportion asking and pretending to be in need (‘humbugging’ in Aboriginal English). Myers concluded that sharing was often initiated not by those who had something or had too much of something, but rather by those who were asking, an activity that Nicolas Peterson called ‘demand sharing’ (Peterson 1993, see also Altman 2011). In these contexts people are granted the right to ask for things, and they find it morally difficult to reject a demand if one was seen to be able to satisfy it. This suggests that the practices of sharing were not simply a mode of resource allocation but all about dealing with social relationships in a particular way. While this is true for transfers between humans more generally, sharing seems to be characterised by a particular tension between autonomy and dependency (Myers 1988) in contrast to varying evaluations of dependency in societies dominated by market and gift-exchange (see Martin 2021).

Myers’ ethnography also debunked the assumption that sharing was an automatism that followed out of collective ownership or out of a lack of property rights in things. By contrast, the items that Pintupi foragers brought back to camp, such as gathered fruits or small game animals and whatever else their ‘country’ (the land they belong to) was providing, were quite clearly subject to very specific property rights. These rights were partly obtained through labour, when collecting for example, or through kinship and a sense of belonging to a particular country. And there was no automatism that translated these rights into transfers, but rather they were subject to protracted negotiations. Allocations and (re-)distributions of foraged foods, household and ritual items constantly changed. In most societies in which a lot of sharing is being practiced, people do have a choice either to include others in the sharing or to hide items from them. At the same time, they feel that what they part with is not ‘extra’ (like second-hand clothing that well-to-do urbanites in the Global North readily give away) but something that they readily and happily could use themselves. They may therefore only let go of it begrudgingly. The social rules of what constitutes forms of ‘co-ownership’ do vary culturally and so do the actual strategies of asking, taking, and ‘allowing to take’. The occurrence of sharing behaviour cannot be sufficiently explained by the economic and ecological pressures of a resource situation, even though these play a role. The same is true for absence of sharing: Sharing may break down under conditions of extreme shortage and it may thrive when things are abundant, but there is a lot of leeway in between, with culturally specific forms emerging in different contexts. On the one hand, sharing is an adaptive problem-solver for uneven resource distribution, but on the other hand it also involves problems since both nagging requests and inacceptable responses can become divisive. At the same time, the tolerance for open demands but also for attempts to hide and keep have been noted by ethnographers working in societies with a high incidence of sharing.

In other words, if sharing is neither an inevitable product of constant shortage, nor of boundless affluence, it depends critically on dealing successfully with an abundance of requests, on a sense of what constitutes a good response to requests and on what is appropriate access to items of value. It is in this context that being economically in need (or being in the position to provide) becomes relevant for judging which requests are appropriate. Sharing not only redistributes resources but it also recalibrates the social problems of navigating through multiple expectations, entitlements, relationships, and demands. Comparatively speaking sharing depends on what is of value to humans, as humans share more than they need to - and less than they are being asked for.

Sharing and access: gained, granted and demanded

If it is not scarcity or abundance by itself that explains sharing, what are the conditions that enable and encourage, or disable and discourage, sharing? The subject matter of what is being shared is an important factor. Some things are easier and more readily shared than others, and some things lend themselves to be used for other forms of transfer such as gift-exchange or buying and selling. Amongst hunter-gatherers, ‘country food’ items are more readily shared than purchased items, and small items collected while foraging are more readily kept for individual consumption than larger ‘bulky’ items such as big hunted animals, elephants, or whales, for instance (Widlok 2017: 92-8, see also Ready & Power 2018: 76). The latter may invite more specific forms of distributions because they typically involve more of a collaborative effort or investment and more elaborate infrastructure such as boats or traps that need to be maintained.

Many more things can be shared in an economic system than what those who are living in a market economy may think. Researchers working with the Aché people of South America noted that they received more than 80 per cent of all their goods through sharing transfers (Kaplan & Hill 1985). Food collected was more readily shared when out collecting than food bought back to the mission settlement, but it seems that the permeability of domains is again subject to social negotiation as items can move from the domain of buying to that of sharing and vice versa. Even in a capitalist market economy there are many transfers which are not buying and selling. About 60 per cent of the population in post-industrial societies make a living not by buying and selling their labour but rather through ‘other’ transfers (see Ferguson [2015: 20] and Widlok [2017: xiii]). These transfers include state-orchestrated payments of social security, the individual support of dependent family members, and other forms of ‘giving’ like inheritance or neighbourhood assistance, for example.

What is important to keep in mind for those living in a highly materialist society, however, is that sharing is not only and not always primarily about objects that change hands, but at least as much about those involved in the giving and receiving. It is as much about ‘sharing in’ the social relations of givers and receivers as about ‘sharing out’, i.e. the transfer of objects. Among prime objects that can be shared are also immaterial things such as time and visits, knowledge and skills, and experiences more generally. However, what is subject to sharing and what is not cannot always be predicted. Mbendjele central African foragers are happy to share most personal items but they sell songs and rituals (Lewis 2015). San share knowledge about the whereabouts of game animals and not only the meat of hunted animals (Biesele & Barclay 2001). And hobbyists and professionals in industrialised societies may be happy to share their informal insider-knowledge (see Lave & Wenger 1991) without sharing their salaries. In fact, it seems that much sharing takes place under the radar of economic thinking because it often takes immaterial forms and it involves many unmarked and mundane social interactions.

One of the common motivations of sharing is that it prevents accumulation, including the accumulation of power and the creation of dependencies. East African hunter-gatherers such as the Hadza of Tanzania are well-known for their sharing of meat. But even though their situation is one of relative equality, tendencies towards accumulation exist for them as well: Initiated Hadza men are reported to try to reserve some meat for themselves (see Woodburn 1998). Although they do not always succeed in it and although the quantity of meat may actually be limited, this shows a general problem that sharing responds to, namely the potential of turning the allocation of items into a tool for power play and privilege. In some cases, for instance the present-day mixed economy of Canadian Inuit, sharing is tacitly transformed into public and marked acts of generous gift-giving that invokes obligations and supports inequality (see Ready & Power 2018).

James Woodburn, who provided the Hadza ethnography mentioned, insists that sharing has to be distinguished from other forms of transfer, such as gift-giving, because of its social implications: While gift-giving can serve as a tool for gaining status (as a generous and affluent person) and for creating dependencies and obligations, sharing works in the opposite direction. Gift-giving allows people to accumulate status and to create followers through giving and this holds for reciprocal gift-giving with obligatory counter-gifts as well as for gifts that are not returned (Yan 2020). It is well understood as a system for creating mutual obligations, even dependencies, and for marking relationships between giver and receiver as special, also among hunter-gatherers. San foragers of southern Africa are known for cultivating friendships over time and distance through their hxaro exchange systems (Wiessner 1982) and the literature on potlatch in North America and on kula gift giving in Oceania and elsewhere is enormous (see Yan 2020, Widlok 2017). This literature has played such a major role in anthropology’s drive towards pointing at alternatives to the dominant market economy that accounts of sharing were initially often subsumed under forms of ‘reciprocal gift exchange’ (see Mauss 2004). However, sharing as a social practice runs counter to many features of gift-giving, such as public display, strategic dependency, status accumulation, and the creation of obligations, in so that it is now considered a social institution in its own right (Woodburn 1998; Widlok 2017).

It is therefore important to point out that not all reports about giving are instances of sharing – nor are they all about gifts. Gifts are predicated on the obligations of giving, receiving, and returning (Mauss 2004). Sharing, by contrast, can be unidirectional (Hunt 2000). Even if it is mutual, it does not create the same obligations to accept and the same calculated and anticipated returns. Rather, it can effectively decouple giving from receiving; it is not framed as ‘I give so that you will give in return’. This is typically achieved by simply allowing others to take, by not preventing them from taking an object or a share. It is granting a share without necessarily handing over things. This underlines the rightfulness of the share and understates the fact that it was provided by a ‘richer’ party towards a ‘poorer’ party. Leaving things for others to take decouples receiving from returning. It highlights the entitlement of the recipient to what is given rather than the entitlement of the giver on what is to be expected as a return. The mutuality we find in sharing is a far cry from the calculated reciprocity that characterises other transfers, including many forms of gift-giving. Although things often flow both ways in sharing, these flows can be very uneven, they can be delayed and diffused in many ways, and they do not allow for the conversion into accumulated political capital that serves to steer obligations. Hunter-gatherer ethnography does report on various ways of dividing an animal and to allocate specific pieces of meat to specific kinsmen. But this should always be read in the context of two important conditions: firstly, the processual nature of ‘waves of sharing’ and secondly, the levelling power of sharing to undermine lasting obligations.

‘Waves’ and ‘rounds’ of sharing have been observed in many cases (see Ichikawa 2005: 155). Frequently, a hunter is not the person allocating hunted meat and allocation rules may apply in a first wave of sharing that may privilege some (close kin or in-laws of the hunter, for instance). However, this does not prevent meat from being divided further and indiscriminately in subsequent waves. As a result, the resource may ultimately get distributed widely, not only to immediate or specific kin but frequently to anyone who happens to be present. ‘Sharing as levelling’ not only refers to the fact that sharing broadens the circle of people who have access to a good, but also that efforts are typically made to disconnect the act of giving from that of taking. This is most readily achieved by using intermediaries: Children are often sent to carry food from one house to another (Widlok 2017: 7). Others are frequently allowed to take rather than making them wait until they are being given. Thus there are moral rules but also simple practical features that prevent individuals from using sharing as a tool for converting what is given into specific obligations and as a means for ‘investment’ aimed at receiving specific returns. This is very different from prototypical gift-exchange systems (both in pre-colonial Oceania and in bourgeois birthday gift-giving) which is not incompatible with a careful record being kept of what is given, what is received, and what is returned as a gift. Sharing, by contrast, helps to diffuse the attempts to turn, for instance, hunting luck into a tool for dominating others and is therefore an important levelling mechanism to make societies more egalitarian. The combined effect of the waves of sharing and of levelling is that sharing basically continues until there is no more ground for making demands (e.g. when the animal is consumed) while gift-giving continues because it creates the ground of making more gifts in the future.

Drawing a sharp distinction, we could say that the obligation to give, receive, and return gifts is replaced by the opportunity to ask, to respond, and to renounce (Widlok 2017: 79). The opportunity to ask is enabled not only by accepted ways of requests and demands but also by a permeable ordering of space that allows potential recipients to make themselves present to those who have something to share (see Widlok 2021). The opportunity to respond shows in the debates that people have about what is a rightful share or what might be an outrageous demand. And finally, the opportunity to renounce allows people to let go of things that they cannot keep for themselves forever anyway. But this sharp analytic distinction does not preclude that, in practice, people shift and combine different modes of transferring all the time.

Sharing and expansion in online and offline communities

Ethnographers have observed many instances in which people tried to hide and insert into commercial transfers what was expected to be shared with others (see Widlok 2017: 94). ‘Borrowed’ clothes or other personal items often ended up being shared, in that they were never returned even though the givers were for a long time hoping to receive them back. In some contexts reported from Oceania, what missionaries considered ‘stealing’ was called ‘borrowing’ by local boarding school students and could at the same time be categorised as ‘sharing’ by the anthropologist (Strathern 2011). The rules for dividing ‘bulky’ resources such as whales and other big animals that are being distributed among Inuit and other Nordic hunters are another case in point where sharing and other modes of transfer come together. Having contributed to a collective effort such as a whale hunt gives individuals rights in certain parts of the animals. In Alaska, the captain, the harpooner, and the owner of the harpoon all get specific shares, but for the rest of the crew shares are equal independently of whether they participated for a few days or for the whole season - and about a third of the whale are ‘designated as the community share’ at feasts where everyone receives something (Bodenhorn 2005: 84). For smaller animals such as seals, there are elaborate gift-exchange partnerships that people cultivate and which should not be mistaken for sharing (as pointed out above, see Widlok [2017: 53-5]). Inuit examples of sharing from the literature have been important also in other respects. Inuit researchers were the first ones to point out that sharing often does not always ‘even out’. In other words, there may be net receivers and net providers in sharing systems (Pryor & Graburn 1980). Calculated ‘reciprocity’, giving so that one can calculate on a more or less equal return, is not what is motivating these transfers, since they occur without calculation and without things balancing out. Instead, a sense of ‘mutuality’ is indeed involved in that there is a strong expectation that everyone would need to share if they find themselves in the position to do so despite the common experience that some find themselves in that position more regularly than others. In terms of net results and in terms of motivation, strict reciprocity thus seems unnecessary for a sharing system to work, but a degree of mutuality is. This is particularly clear with regard to immaterial sharing, for instance, sharing time or a place to live and work, which requires mutual engagement, attentiveness, and recognition of equal entitlements as social persons despite inequalities. This mutuality that is built into sharing should not be confused with a logic of ‘do-ut-des’ (I give so that I receive). It is not a balancing ‘tit-for-tat’ expectation with balance-keeping (I give as much as I have received). Consequently, Inuit researchers have pointed out the importance of ‘non-material’ forms of sharing, above all sharing time with one another through visiting (Pryor & Graburn 1980). This is echoed by research elsewhere, for instance the importance of sharing a place to sleep in Aboriginal Australia (Musharbash 2008).

It is tempting to continue along these immaterial lines and also include forms of sharing that take place on digital platforms (see below). However, even in digital environments, established and distinctive modes of transfer can be observed. Thus, many transfers among software developers are akin to gift-giving (see Zeitlyn 2003), providing the accumulation of status. The developers of ‘shareware’ software such as Ubuntu also face a situation in which there is a threat of code being appropriated and abused for corporate ‘hoarding’ and accumulation by some while it is defended as freely accessible by others (see Widlok 2017: 159). At the same time, the sharing of content on many internet platforms is accompanied by the accumulation of marketable data by a third party that operates in the background. It seems, therefore, that the interplay of different modes of transfer is as much a bone of contention on large digital platforms as it is in small hunter-gatherer groups. The question that remains is whether sharing as ‘enlarging the circle of those who access what is valued’ is compromised by the size of the group within the circle.

Local Exchange and Trading Systems (LETS), in which participants offer one another goods or services without the exchange of money (Hart 2000), are sometimes considered examples of sharing. That is because these modes of transfers provide members access to goods without participating in the general market or the money economy. Members can sign up to a platform or a noticeboard where they can trade in their particular skills or assets for what they need (e.g, a particular tool or someone to cut the lawn, take the dog out etc.). An internal currency often helps to store in a ‘time bank’ what can then be used in the form of vouchers to receive support from other members (see Widlok 2017: 145). LETS do not constitute sharing in a narrow sense because they are more like barter systems, as detailed records are being kept, often based on alternative currencies or vouchers. It has also been repeatedly reported that these systems only work up to a specific size that guarantees mutual trust (Widlok 2019a: 32). In any case a set membership tends to be a prerequisite for them, ideally supported by local, personal knowledge of each other that prevents free-riding. The primary goal of LETS is often not to extend the circle of participants but, to the contrary, to make sure that it does not extend beyond control and beyond the circle of trusted members. Correspondingly, these systems only provide small niches within the larger market economy. Recently, neighbourhood platforms have emerged which seek to carry the LETS system into the digital domain (Widlok 2019a). This has happened to sharing, too. What is new here is that online platforms are not only the tool for exchanges or transfers in the non-digital world but constitute an arena of sharing in itself, with individuals sharing knowledge in ‘how-to’ videos, as well as sharing ideas and swapping or copying music, pictures, and other forms of digitised messages. This has created the impression that sharing practices have received a boost beyond previous limits, to the extent that parts of the digital economy are sometimes called ‘the sharing economy’. However, it is important to be precise here, as the English term ‘sharing’ glosses over important differences.

Some acts of digital communication effectively concentrate attention instead of distributing anything or granting access to what is valued. In fact, sharing content via social media may be more like a demand on others to share attention, time, or support. It can also serve to accumulate followers and ‘hoard’ support. Just like spam messages, it is part of the often unsolicited and unwanted giving of what is not a value, but rather a burden. Thus, free software, sometimes known as ‘shareware’, frequently turns out to be malicious in that its recipients find it difficult to detect on or de-install from their computers. Moreover, social media publishing often confers value and status to the giver rather than being realised by the receiver who is literally degraded to being a ‘follower’ and not someone with a rightful share in a resource. Digital publishing and distribution can therefore be very unlike sharing, and more like gift-giving, initiated by the giver as an attempt to oblige the recipient to receive and return (see Zeitlyn 2003). Its precedent in the analogue world may be where surplus goods are put on the street for anyone to pick up – in many cases, things not particularly valued or wanted by others. The social implications of such acts of ‘getting rid of things’ are primarily the status creation for morally self-righteous providers who expect the supposedly needy to owe them gratitude (Widlok 2017: 147-51).

The English term ‘sharing’ has undergone a very peculiar development in recent years which confuses these modes of transfer, at least in part purposefully. English language corpora show that the notion of sharing has been widened to include many more objects in recent decades (John 2017: 26). Google analytics shows an increased pairing of ‘sharing’ with ‘caring’, and the sense of ‘sharing your feelings with’ others, which were not much used before but became widespread through the internet and social media (John 2017: 103). Communication scholars like Nicolas John conclude from this that the usage of ‘sharing’ has changed from a distributive sense to a communicative one. Here ‘being on a digital platform together’ is enough to constitute ‘sharing’, exemplified by the notorious ‘share’ button in several online social networks. By contrast, many anthropologists working in social environments in which distributive sharing is very strong noted that there was not one single term that would correspond to the English notion of ‘sharing’. Instead, people would speak about ‘helping out’, ‘supplying’, or ‘lending’ (see Widlok 2017: 19-20). Clearly, to talk about sharing and to practice it are two different things. But the problem we are facing is that talking about sharing is to some extent implicated in sharing practices. For instance, regular complaints about people no longer sharing can be part of a strategy of eliciting a share. In the Arctic case study mentioned above (Pryor & Graburn 1980), it emerged that those who talked most about the importance of sharing were not necessarily those who did the most of it and vice versa. Studying sharing may thus imply establishing technical terms that distinguish it from buying and selling and from gift-giving, rather than simply adopting the labels used by the agents themselves.

We are therefore well-advised not to be too ‘logocentric’, too hung up on labels, but rather to put the practices of sharing and its social implications at the centre of our attention. This includes paying attention to the language strategies that form a part of these practices. People may disagree on what to call a transfer, but their actions usually speak louder than their words. Moreover, given the moral connotations of various labels, they may be part of strategies to re-classify transfers. In the above mentioned cases from the Pacific, locals spoke of ‘lending’ what missionaries classified as ‘stealing’ (Strathern 2011). Similarly, when ‘car sharing’ first entered the market for short-term rentals, there were initially reservations to actually use the term ‘sharing’ as it was feared to carry negative connotations (John 2017: 7). Since then, many enterprises in the platform-based economy have employed the misnomer ‘sharing economy’ because of the positive sentiments that it has accumulated. The ‘disruptive’ economic strategies of UBER, AirBnB, Mechanical Turk, and so forth are primarily commercial and are not examples of sharing in a more technical sense. They make profit by opening up domains of life to market transactions that were previously not: for instance, giving others a lift as in hitchhiking or helping others out with odd jobs. The qualification ‘primarily’ is necessary here, because the combination and articulation between economic interests, moral aspirations, and change is an on-going dynamic (see Widlok 2019b). It is tempting to label everything ‘sharing’ or ‘gift-giving’ that does not look like a typical market exchange. But especially in complex transfers involving givers, takers, providers, revenue-recipients, and onlookers, several modes of transfer may be involved. What is central from an anthropological perspective is that different modes of transfer are interwoven with one another. Sharing may be a particularly old human practice. As a cultural practice, it has not disappeared when markets were introduced but it also does not automatically re-emerge when markets are shaken, disrupted, or expanded onto digital platforms. For sharing to be successfully (re-)instated or combined with other modes of transfer in the future, a number of preconditions will have to be in place.

Conclusion: the future of sharing

Sharing food or pressing a share button on a digital platform are not the same thing, as the latter too often amplifies ‘leader-follower’ and ‘influencer-influenced’ constellations and ultimately aims at generating profit. Actual sharing practices, by contrast, presuppose and reproduce positions of mutuality. So-called ‘peer-to-peer transactions’ on the internet may provide a degree of mutuality as well, but they often remain compromised, not least because platform providers accumulate information and keep knowledge about algorithms that structure digital interaction to themselves. There is typically no mutuality between platform users and those who hoard status or money as part of online publishing. Permeable public space is another prerequisite for sharing, again often compromised by gated communities and by ‘hoarding’, in the double sense of the word as accumulating and as concealing behind a fence (see Widlok 2021). Taxation may thus be a form of sharing when allowing poorer citizens access to collective wealth, but it also runs the danger of the third, redistributing party abusing access to the pooled resources. With respect to sharing, public control of state power may thus be comparable to public access to algorithms in the platform economy.

Some features of the digital environment may open up new space for sharing. After all, sharing has become cheaper, as creating digital copies and providing wider access to digital resources often comes at relatively little additional cost in comparison to creating and sharing material items. It is therefore not surprising that many digital platforms that are vast and allow ‘peer to peer’ exchange set high hopes in developing sharing both online and offline. However, not every initiative that uses the label ‘sharing’ manages to bring about actual social benefits, and several come with social and individual costs. So, the future will tell whether or not the expansion of the digital world will enable transactions that reduce strategic status aggrandising, foster personal autonomy, limit centralised resource control, and value renunciation rather than an economic ideology of endless growth. Such actual forms of sharing would limit boundless accumulation and could allow us to deal productively with inevitable asymmetries. Since sharing allows potential recipients to initiate transfers through requests and to avoid obligations to be used in power plays, it broadens access to material and immaterial items of value. As such, it has the potential to foster sociality between people - and maybe to improve on it, too.

References

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Note on contributor

Thomas Widlok is Professor for Cultural Anthropology of Africa at the University of Cologne. He received his PhD from the London School of Economics and is author of Living on Mangetti (1999, Oxford University Press) and of Anthropology and the economy of sharing (2017, Routledge). He has co-edited Property and equality (2005, Berghahn) and The situationality of human-animal relations (2019, Transcript-Verlag).

Prof. Dr. Thomas Widlok, African Studies, University of Cologne, Albertus-Magnus-Platz, 50923 Köln, Germany. thomas.widlok@uni-koeln.de

Games

Felix Stein — Tue, 07 May 2019 15:54:36 +0000

Max Watson

Independent scholar

Initially published 7 May 2019

http://doi.org/10.29164/19games

Abstract:

Though there is no universally accepted definition for what constitutes a ‘game’, games are typically defined as goal-oriented, rules-based activities closely associated with the notion of ‘play’. In anthropology, though seldom the primary focus of a monograph, games can serve as a window into the broader lives and valuations of their players. More practically, they can also be excellent vehicles for conducting participant-observation and building rapport with interlocutors. The three sections of this entry seek to provide a general overview of anthropological insights into the world of games. The first section covers attempts to define games as a concept. The second section asks what makes games meaningful. The third section examines anthropological approaches to the most recent major development in the world of games: the rise of digital games.

Games as a concept

The arenas that mark archaeological sites—like The Great Ballcourt of Chichen Itza or the Colosseum of Rome—and board games whose lineage can be traced back thousands of years—like Senet, Go, Mancala, and backgammon—are testaments to games’ longstanding place in human history. Games can also have strong geographic linkages. Global spectacles like the Olympic Games and World Cup draw participants and billions of spectators from most of the world’s nations. Some games, like cricket throughout much of the British Commonwealth, can make manifest linkages between distant nations. Other games, like the Sri Lankan board game Carrom or the Finnish ball game Pesäpallo, are played primarily within the borders of particular nation-states. Games are played by people of different ages and walks of life: from hopscotch in the schoolyard to bridge in retirement homes, and from improvised football to exclusive polo.

Although games are widespread and familiar to many of the world’s peoples, providing a compelling, overarching definition for what constitutes ‘a game’ has proved difficult. Rules are widely seen as an important component of games (e.g. Huizinga 1949; Caillois 1961; Suits 1967; Avedon & Sutton-Smith 1981; Meier 1995; Suits 1995; Salen & Zimmerman 2003). But of course, rules govern many aspects of human life and are not restricted to games alone. What ostensibly sets the rules of a game apart from other rules-based activities is not just the special reasons for which these rules are constructed, but also the players’ attitude toward those rules. As Bernard Suits, who spent much of his career working on a universal definition of games, put it:

To play a game is to attempt to achieve a specific state of affairs [prelusory goal], using only means permitted by rules [lusory means], where the rules prohibit use of more efficient in favour of less efficient means [constitutive rules], and where the rules are accepted just because they make possible such activity [lusory attitude] (2005: 54-5).

Suits connects his definition of games to a particular way of playing them (i.e. ‘the lusory attitude’). He does not, for example, consider those who cheat to be adopting a lusory attitude and thus does not consider them to be playing the game (2005: 25). Yet, as Angela Schneider points out, games seldom play out so neatly in practice: some players might play by the rules, but others will not; some players will be invested in the game, but others might not be (2001). Nonetheless, for Schneider, a game like rugby is still a game even if the motivations for playing and adherence to the rules differ from player to player. When it comes to adhering to a game’s rules, Schneider contends ‘[e]thically we should of course, but logically we needn’t’ (2001: 158). As we shall see in more detail throughout this entry, the diverse reasons people have for playing games and the different ways in which they go about negotiating a game’s rules are where games can take on their most important meaning.

Anthropologists have offered many insightful analyses of the extent of the relationships between games and play. For example, David Graeber has theorised that play is unpredictable, whereas games are clearly defined by rules (Graeber 2015). For Graeber, what is special about a game’s rules vis-à-vis the rules of propriety in regular life is that the rules of a game are easily discernible at any given moment, and thus present a ‘utopia of rules’. Thomas Malaby, one of the most prominent anthropologists writing on the subject of games and play, has posited his own definition of games—‘[a] game is a semibounded and socially legitimate domain of contrived contingency that generates interpretable outcomes’ (2007: 96)—and has praised efforts to

decouple playful experience from a determinate relationship with games, just as scholars of ritual (many of them anthropologists) have recognized ritual as a cultural form irrespective of whether it brings about religious experience (2009a: 212).

Malaby’s ‘decoupling’ stance is not intended as an outright separation of games and play, but rather, akin to the point made by Schneider, is meant to point out that the two concepts need not necessarily go hand in hand. The strength of Malaby’s approach is that it leaves the door open for interchange between anthropological work on games and anthropological work on play—such as that of Gregory Bateson (1987)—without fusing them into the same category.

Indeed, anthropological work on games and play, respectively, has greatly helped to refine understandings of games. For example, Roger Caillois, one of the twentieth century’s best-known theorists of games and play, emphasised the role of games as playful activities largely outside the sphere of economic productivity. As he put it, ‘[a]t the end of the game, all can and must start over at the same point. Nothing has been harvested or manufactured, no masterpiece has been created, no capital has accrued’ (1961: 5). However, subsequent anthropological work on play, like that of David Lancy amongst the Kpelle—who, Lancy found, see work and play not as mutually exclusive but as components of all human endeavours—has compellingly questioned a hard work/play binary (1980). Meanwhile, ethnographic work on certain games, like T.L. Taylor’s account of professional digital games players (2012), shows that there are most definitely games in which capital is accrued and all does not start over at the same point. It is in no small part because of these anthropological efforts that hard divisions like Caillois’ between games and work have now largely been abandoned by theorists of games and play. As Jesper Juul, a leading scholar within the relatively new field of games studies, explains, ‘both are clearly not perfect boundaries, but rather fuzzy areas under constant negotiation’ (2003: 4).

Anthropologists have compellingly argued that games and play are distinct, if often related, concepts. However, many who read about games in the English language will likely find this position discordant with the existence of games and play as interrelated words. As Johan Huizinga—a scholar to whose seminal work Homo ludens nearly all subsequent theorists of games and play make reference—noted, this connection seems inexorable: one plays a game (1949: 37). How might we reconcile these two facts? While Huizinga claims that ‘you do not “do” a game as you “do” or “go” fishing, or hunting […] you “play” it’ (1949: 37), it might actually be useful to think of the English term ‘to play a game’ in the sense of how one does a game (just as one sings a song or drives a car) in order to better distinguish between various ways in which people approach games. Thus one might play a game playfully—or angrily, or reluctantly—just as one might drive a car playfully, or angrily, or reluctantly.

Similarly, it can at times be useful to take a step back from efforts to precisely define games, and instead use a broader conceptualization of what games are. One prominent example of such a move comes from the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, who said of the various types of games:

…we see a complicated network of similarities overlapping and criss-crossing: sometimes overall similarities, sometimes similarities of detail.

I can think of no better expression to characterize these similarities than “family resemblances”; for the various resemblances between members of a family: build, features, colour of eyes, gait, temperament, etc. etc. overlap and criss-cross in the same way—And I shall say: ‘games’ form a family (1986: 31-2).

Wittgenstein by no means had the last word on games, a fact to which the subsequent accounts of Caillois, Suits, and others is testament. However, his description accords well with the implicit approach of most anthropologists to games, whose preoccupation—like when handling most subjects—is less with providing a universally tenable definition of games, and more with discerning what is meaningful about the particular games in which their interlocutors partake.

Indeed, some of the most insightful discussions of games within anthropology emerge when particular games are described in contradistinction to related themes. For example, Arjun Appadurai has examined the enduring popularity of cricket in postcolonial India as an example of decolonization being a ‘dialogue with the colonial past’ rather than a ‘dismantling of colonial habits and modes of life’ (Appadurai 1995). Roberte Hamayon, Harry Walker, and Ted Leyenaar have all shown how games can both impact and reflect relations between Indigenous peoples and the state (Leyenaar 1992; Walker 2013; Hamayon 2016). Leyenaar, for example, studied the ancient Mesoamerican ball game Ulama in contemporary Mexico and found that, like many of the Indigenous peoples who created and developed the game, Ulama had been pushed to the margins of the Mexican state. Victor Turner and others have made productive comparisons between ritual and games—for Turner, for example, both are notable for how they place their participants (and potential observers) in a transitional state that falls outside normal life (Turner 1982; Seligman et al. 2008). Ellen Oxfeld has studied Mahjong amongst Chinese entrepreneurs in Calcutta and found the nature of the game, with its risks and rewards, similar to the nature of her interlocutors’ business endeavours (Oxfeld 1993). Loïc Wacquant has discussed boxing and race in Chicago’s Southside neighbourhood, where for his interlocutors the order of a boxer’s regimen stood as a counterpart to the disorder many experienced in their lives outside the gym (Wacquant 2004). And Robertson Allen, T.J. Cornell, and T.B. Allen have examined the relationships between war and games – including those specifically made to acclimatise citizens to the military (Cornell & Allen 2002; Allen 2017).

This is not to say that in such accounts games are relegated to mere foils for understanding more important concepts; just as games can help to hone our understandings of other phenomena, these phenomena can help to hone our understanding of games. Such a fact has been famously displayed by Claude Lévi-Strauss in his comparison of games and ritual:

[a]ll games are defined by a set of rules which in practice allow the playing of any number of matches. Ritual, which is also ‘played’, is on the other hand, like a favoured instance of a game, remembered from among the possible ones because it is the only one which results in a particular type of equilibrium between the two sides. The transposition is readily seen in the case of the Gahuku-Gama of New Guinea who have learnt football but who will play, several days running, as many matches as are necessary for both sides to reach the same score (1962: 20).

What makes games meaningful?

Both the games an anthropologist chooses to focus on and what she or he reads into them can have significant implications. It goes without saying that not all games are equally meaningful, and one of the tasks facing anthropologists and others interested in analyzing games is figuring out how to parse the myriad varieties of games often on display. For example, Huizinga contended that ‘[s]olitary play is productive of culture only in a limited degree’ (1949: 47) and that it is the ‘play-community’ formed between players that gives games their social importance (1949: 17-8). Though much of Huizinga’s work has been critiqued by subsequent scholars of games, almost all of them focus on multiplayer games as sources for meaningful play—a point which takes on new importance with the rise of digital games, as we shall see in the next section. Monetary stakes are another way in which games can be meaningful to their players. Indeed, much of the anthropological literature on games focuses on those in which money is at stake (see, for example, the entry on gambling in this encyclopedia). Nonetheless, anthropologists have compellingly argued that money alone is seldom what makes games meaningful.

Likely the most famous such example, and perhaps the best-known account of a game within anthropology, comes from Clifford Geertz’s account of the Balinese cockfight. In Geertz’s analysis, the cockfight is not a mere spectacle upon which the Balinese wager vast sums of money, but a process through which ‘the Balinese forms and discovers his temperament and his society’s temper at the same time’ (1973: 451). Framed as such, the cockfight is meaningful for how it perpetuates the traditions and valuations of the past. Moreover, Geertz’s presence at one particular unsanctioned cockfight meant that he was also present for the police action which broke it up: by fleeing with the rest of the participants and hiding out alongside some of them, he finally established a convivial rapport with his interlocutors (1973: 415-6). While the fame of Geertz’s rendition of the cockfight might make it seem like it was the only game in town, Geertz’s own account shows otherwise. As he notes, in his field site there was a ‘sociomoral hierarchy’ of players and games:

At most cockfights there are, around the very edges of the cockfight area, a large number of mindless, sheer-chance type gambling games (roulette, dice throw, coin-spin, pea-under-the shell) operated by concessionaires. Only women, children, adolescents, and various other sorts of people who do not (or not yet) fight cocks—the extremely poor, the socially despised, the personally idiosyncratic—play at these games, at, of course, penny ante levels. Cockfighting men would be ashamed to go anywhere near them (1973: 435).

Geertz’s decision to focus on the cockfight gave us an arresting view into his field site. But one must wonder whether these other games were as meaningless as he made them out to be, or whether a closer look at them might have revealed a different type of ethnography more sensitive to the daily lives and valuations of Balinese who were not elite men. Indeed, children’s games have featured as a specific point of focus in other ethnographic accounts, from Stewart Culin’s writings about cat’s cradle amongst North American indigenous peoples (1907: 761-80), to Mizuko Ito’s work on digital games amongst Japanese and American schoolchildren (2009).

Newer anthropological accounts of games tend to criticise approaches like Geertz’s. Malaby, for example, critiques Geertz’s analysis of the cockfight because

[t]his treatment of a game…trades one kind of reductionism for another. In his zeal to trump whatever material stakes were in play with the different stakes of meaning-making, Geertz eliminated from consideration any consequence beyond the affirmation of meaning. On his view, games become static appraisals of an unchanging social order; and thereby one element that is vital for any understanding of the experience of play is lost. That element is the indeterminacy of games, and the way in which, by being indeterminate in their outcomes, they encapsulate (albeit in a contrived fashion) the open-endedness of everyday life (2009a: 207, 208)

The structure of Malaby’s argument is reminiscent of Lévi-Strauss’ distinction between ritual and games. In this case, Geertz appears to have inverted game and ritual by interpreting the cockfight ‘like a favoured instance of a game’ (i.e. Lévi-Strauss’ ritual) rather than as an actual game which might have different outcomes from one instance to the next. This, however, begs the question of whether the Balinese cockfight is really best considered a game, a ritual, or some combination of the two.

It is worth noting the work of Anthony Pickles for how it manages to highlight both the perpetuation of tradition found in accounts like Geertz’s, and the potential for changes to social order found in accounts like Malaby’s. Pickles offers a fascinating account of two card-based gambling games in Goroka, Papua New Guinea. One game, called kwin (queen), is strategic and slow-paced, slow to adopt changes in rules, and popular amongst older players, while the other game, called bom (bomb), is faster-paced, part of a quickly changing genre of games, and popular amongst younger players (Pickles 2014). Pickles’ dual focus allows us to see in kwin one game that is akin to Geertz’s interpretation of the cockfight, and in bom another which has more in common with newer anthropological interest in the negotiability of games. Crucially, meaning here is found not just in these respective games and what they stand for, but in the tension between them and their respective players—a point worth bearing in mind for anthropologists who encounter several distinct, prominent games in one field site.

Pickles’ account of bom shows us how new rules and new games can be created in a relatively short period of time. But it is also worth remembering Schneider’s aforementioned point that, while games may have a set of rules, these are not always universally and perfectly adhered to. Rather, rules are constantly susceptible to being undermined or renegotiated by their players, either inadvertently, as in a new player making an error out of ignorance, or purposefully, as in cases of cheating (Consalvo 2005, 2007, 2009). This process is not the corruption of games so much as it is an essential and important part of them. In other words, games are not just meaningful for the potential actions that their rules dictate, but for how players choose to go about adjudicating disputes about those rules. For example, Linda Hughes, studying American schoolgirls who play the ball game foursquare, finds that the game serves not simply as a playful pastime for the children, but also helps them to learn lifelong skills like problem solving and teamwork (1991, 1999). Indeed, in many games, adjudication of the rules is handled by the players themselves; think, for example, of playing a board game with friends.

When the financial or physical stakes of a game rise (and especially when both happen at once), very often adjudication shifts from the players themselves to a third party responsible for ensuring both safety and fairness. Think of the referees in many games typically referred to as ‘sports’, such as football or boxing, or the presence of dealers in casinos. As Geertz notes, the cockfight too has its ‘umpire (saja komong; djuru kembar)…[whose] authority is absolute’ (1973: 423, 424). The presence of a third-party adjudicator does not necessarily mean that a game is more meaningful than a game adjudicated by its players, but it can have important implications. For example, compare two different instances of the game football: one is a professional match with a referee, the other is a pickup match played in a public park. In professional football, the practice of ‘simulation’ or ‘diving’ is commonplace. It involves players exaggerating or outright feigning the effects of physical contact from opposing players in the hopes that the referee will be fooled and call a foul against the opposing team. In pickup football, where players determine fouls communally, this practice is far less prevalent. Both instances are technically the same game, sharing football’s rules and objectives, but nonetheless operate quite differently in practice.

As we can see from the works discussed in this section, determining what makes games meaningful is a tricky endeavour contingent upon many factors. One must consider what constitutes the particular game being discussed, how that game relates (or does not relate) to other games played within a particular field site, and the different ways in which players go about negotiating particular instances of gameplay.

New frontiers: the rise of digital games

The late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries have witnessed one of the most significant changes in the history of games: the rise of digital games, colloquially referred to as ‘video games’. Unlike their analogue counterparts, digital games are written in code, played on computers or consoles, and viewed on monitors or television screens. Their rise to prominence—concomitant with the profusion of ever more affordable, portable, and powerful home electronics—has brought with it numerous different types of digital games. These run the gamut from digital forms of games like chess and billiards, to ‘Massively multiplayer online roleplaying games’ (MMORPGs), which consist of vast spaces in which thousands of players simultaneously navigate their respective avatars. This profusion of new games has rejuvenated an interest in efforts to define ‘games’ (Juul 2003), and has given rise to the new discipline of games studies (Aarseth 2001; Jenkins 2004; Boellstorff 2006). Perhaps predictably, many analyses of digital games bemoan the potential influence of their violent or sexual content (Grossman & DeGaetano 1999; Anderson & Dill 2000; Breyer 2011)—in so doing repeating the same concern that faces nearly all new and popular entertainment media (McLuhan 1964: 314; Galloway 2006: xii).

That being said, the rise of digital technology represents a potentially fundamental shift in the world of games. Namely, one of the most important characteristics of digital games vis-à-vis their analogue counterparts is how they change spatial relations. While some analogue games are carried out by distance—such as correspondence chess—the vast majority are conducted with the participants in close proximity. Conversely, while some digital games are played with one’s teammates and/or opponents nearby—such as playing ‘splitscreen’ (multiple people playing a digital game on the same television or computer monitor) at home or in a group at an internet café—most multiplayer digital games involve people playing alone from their homes while sharing digital space with their peers.

This fact problematises distinctions like Huizinga’s between solitary and communal games, for players might be in one sense solitary—playing a game alone in their rooms—but at the same time be connected to other players through the Internet and in the game itself. This fact can perhaps help to explain some anthropologists’ findings on digital games. For example, Nicholas Long notes that the players and producers of the digital game Ultima Online often make note of amazing ‘community’ within the game, but that Long himself found the relations between players to be far more ephemeral and individualistic (Long 2012). Conversely, Celia Pearce notes how players of one particular game stuck together as a social group even after the game itself had been discontinued (Pearce 2006, 2007, 2010).

Another key facet of digital games is their role as goods. They are a multibillion dollar industry, and anthropologists have turned their attention to not just their players but their producers (Malaby 2009b). The role of gender can loom particularly large, as some digital games are primarily marketed to and played by men, whereas others are primarily marketed to and played by women (Mason 2013). Real-world gender inequities can manifest in digital games. For example, Julian Dibbell found that players whose avatars were women were often subjected to sexual harassment, whereas the same was not true for players whose avatars were men (Dibbell 1993). Race can play a similar role to gender in terms of both marketability and gameplay, as some have shown in games where racial stereotypes are part of a game’s content (Leonard 2003), and others have highlighted in games where players themselves use real-world racial slurs (Shanahan 2004).

The structure of digital games also raises questions about how best to approach them methodologically. There have been two primary ways in which anthropologists have gone about doing so. The first method conceptualises these games as ‘virtual worlds’ (Pearce 2006; Nardi & Harris 2006; Taylor 2006; Pearce 2007; Boellstorff 2008; Pearce 2010; Nardi 2010; Long 2012). Treating the space within these games in a similar way to a physical field site, these scholars conduct long-term participant-observation within them by registering accounts, creating avatars, and interacting with other players in the virtual world. In this vein, the title of Boellstorff’s book Coming of age in Second Life—Second Life being the virtual world in which he conducted his fieldwork—is purposefully designed to emphasise a similarity with Margaret Meade’s classic Coming of age in Samoa (1928). This approach gives us an in-depth view of what playing these games looks like in action and the type of interrelationships that it involves—though it is worth noting that, perhaps because of this approach’s emphasis on virtual worlds as a ‘space’, some who adopt it question these games’ status as ‘games’ at all (Boellstorff 2008: 22).

The second approach more pointedly engages with digital games from the vantage of the physical world, in so doing taking a page from the book of anthropologists who emphasise the local importance of various forms of media, such as television (Abu-Lughod 2005), radio (Englund 2011), and blogs (Doostdar 2004). Daniel Miller has studied Facebook use amongst Trinidadians, and he includes in his book a chapter on the Facebook game FarmVille. Articulating his methodological approach toward one interlocutor, Miller notes that he would spend ‘hours looking over his shoulder as he does Facebook’ for a view into this person’s online life (Miller 2011: 78). Similarly, Florence Chee has examined Korean gamer culture from within internet cafes (2005), and Mizuko Ito has studied the use of educational games by Japanese and American children in classroom and home settings (2009). Alex Golub has used his own experience with the MMORPG World of Warcraft to explicitly critique virtual worlds scholars for underemphasising important extra-game spaces, such as online message boards and real-world gatherings (Golub 2010).

While proponents of each respective approach can sometimes clash, both methods have their strengths when applied to specific genres of digital games. For example, it is unsurprising that the majority of virtual worlds work is conducted within MMORPGs like World of Warcraft. These games most closely resemble the physical world in the sense that players control an avatar within a broader game world, and often contain robust economies where significant amounts of real money changes hands (Castronova 2001). Meanwhile, many other digital games, such as those that require no Internet connection, single-player games, those in which players are disembodied manipulators of many variables (such as Real-time Strategy Games), or those where players are under the finite time constraints of individual matches, are often only practically observable from a physically in-situ vantage. Nor are the approaches inherently mutually exclusive. For example, virtual worlds scholars have more recently and explicitly acknowledged the need to at least be open to physical aspects of games when they arise (Boellstorff et al. 2012: 33, 34).

A final point to make about digital games has to do with adjudication and negotiability. The previous section noted the distinction between games that are adjudicated by their players and those games which are adjudicated by a third party referee. Many digital games present a third form of adjudication: the code itself. For example, the previous section took the example of football, and noted the difference between ‘diving’ in a match adjudicated by players and a match adjudicated by a referee. In a digital game where football is depicted, such as Electronic Arts’ popular FIFA series, diving is simply not an option coded into the game. Even if it were, unless the game also added human referees, it would involve trying to press the ‘dive’ button at the right time and hoping that the computer code would confirm it, rather than the process of tricking a human referee or negotiating with human teammates and opponents. When the ball goes out of bounds in FIFA, there is no arguing with the linesman or quibbling with teammates: the code simply confirms it. The implications of this third type of adjudication found within digital games are still not fully understood, but it may help to explain the ephemerality of social relations some anthropologists have found characteristic of certain digital games (see Watson 2015).

Conclusion

This entry has provided an overview of anthropological work on games. It has underscored key themes and developments in the world of games, from varying conceptualizations of what a game is, to how games are meaningful to their players, to the rise of digital games.

Games will continue to be important sources of anthropological theorization not just because new games are being crafted every day, as the advent of digital games makes clear, nor just because instances of games have unpredictable outcomes, as Malaby’s work reminds us, but also because new connections between games and other important phenomena can always be uncovered. As is often the case with ethnographic work, people engaging in a seemingly innocuous activity like a casual game can offer unexpected vantages onto significant issues. Like with most interesting themes, this means that a discussion about games will never be complete. Readers are therefore encouraged to take a closer look at games in both their own field sites and daily lives. Who knows just what you might find…

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Note on contributor

Max Watson holds Ph.D. and M.Phil. degrees in Social Anthropology from the University of Cambridge and a B.A. in Middle East Studies with a minor in Economics from McGill University. He currently works in the field of communications for the Government of Canada.

Dr. Max O. A. Watson. max.watson@mail.mcgill.ca.

Digital anthropology

Felix Stein — Tue, 28 Aug 2018 13:53:10 +0000

Daniel Miller

University College London

Initially published 28 Aug 2018

http://doi.org/10.29164/18digital

Abstract:

‘The digital’ is defined here as new technologies that are ultimately reducible to binary code. These have made many cultural artefacts easier and quicker to both reproduce and to share. The first section of this entry is concerned with populations and worlds that are largely the result of digital technologies. The second section examines the more general use and consequences of digital technologies on diverse populations around the world. Rather than separating off the impact of digital technologies, a major contribution of anthropology has been through holistic ethnography, which demonstrates that we can only understand new digital worlds in the context of wider social relations and practices. Rather than trying to adjudicate digital technologies as positive or negative, anthropology may also focus upon their inherent contradictions. A third section examines the way digital technologies impact anthropological methodology. In the final section the concern is with the impact digital anthropology may have on our conception of anthropology itself and what it means to be human.

Introduction

On almost any day one can find newspaper articles which tell us we have lost our humanity to smartphone or selfie addiction, or why we should be anxious about how artificial intelligence will replace our labour, or how algorithms reduce our selves to mere data. Sometimes there is a counter-narrative that new technologies can solve all health problems or prevent the catastrophic consequences of climate change. In short, akin with political anthropology, digital anthropology is an arena within which developments are constantly used to make larger normative and ethical arguments rather than merely observe and account for the consequences of technological change.

Anthropology as a discipline began with the study of small-scale societies, regarded as traditional or customary and often wrongly assumed to change slowly, if at all. By contrast, most people regarded the advent of digital technologies as a kind of speeding up of the world, a rather breathless and unrelenting deluge of the new. So an anthropology that is tasked with encompassing and understanding the digital world is perhaps also the final repudiation of that initial illusion that there have ever been societies outside of trajectories of change. It may grant us a more balanced or rounded discipline that is equally concerned with the entire gamut of human experience.

At the same time, rather than being merely a tool in debates over whether digital technologies have good or bad consequences, anthropology has retained its holistic methodology. It is therefore the discipline most likely to situate new technologies within a much wider cultural and social context and thereby appreciate the inherent contradictions and complexities that emerge from the larger study of their use and consequence. Ethnography will show how digital technologies produce both new possibilities for political activism and also for state oppression, creating conditions for the commodification of music and other media and the de-commodification of those same media simultaneously.

The term ‘digital anthropology’ can be used to refer to the consequences of the rise of digital technologies for particular populations, the use of these technologies within anthropological methodology, or the study of specific digital technologies. But the topic may also raise wider questions about the nature of contemporary anthropology itself, both what it now means to be human and how anthropology as a discipline should incorporate worlds that were neither precedented nor possible in the past. This essay will begin with the question of what we mean by ‘the digital’. It then divides the consequences of these technologies into three parts. The first consists of the study of the technologies themselves, via the populations specifically associated with them such as hackers. The discussion then moves to the more general assessment of increasingly ubiquitous digital technologies such as social media upon ordinary populations through traditional ethnographic fieldwork. A third section examines the uses of digital technologies for anthropological methodology. The final section will turn to the larger questions of the implications for the nature of anthropology and humanity.

What is ‘the digital’?

No attempt to define ‘the digital’ should go unchallenged. The definition that will be used for the purposes of this essay will be everything that can be reduced to the outcome of binary coding (Miller & Horst 2012). There are several alternatives. Some might focus more on the rise of cybernetic systems,^[1] while others concentrate upon a separate online world termed ‘virtual’ (e.g. Boellstorff, Nardi, Pearce & Taylor 2012). The reason for choosing a definition based upon binary coding for this entry partly lies in its simplicity. It also has the virtue of highlighting certain key implications. These are firstly that digital technologies made it easier to create products that are completely identical and can therefore be easily reproduced. Secondly, that digital forms are much easier to share. These two properties in turn account for what appears to be a rapid and constant proliferation of new technologies and subsequent products, some of which become ubiquitous and scale up to reach most of the world population in a very short time. So, almost every year the focus of both popular and academic attention is on something different – the internet, search engines, the virtual, social media, big data, artificial intelligence, Tinder, the internet of things, and so forth.

One approach to digital anthropology developed out of material culture studies, which focused as much upon how things make people as with how people make things. We understand who we are in the mirror of a material world within which we are born and socialised. But this world was never static. One way in which culture itself became more diverse and expansive was through the explosion of material products we associate with consumer culture. This has now been extended by the further dynamism and diversity found in digital forms. It is therefore important to remember that while the digital world may often be online, it is not immaterial. There is a material side to the world of ‘bits’ (Blanchette 2011), computers, memes, platforms, digital photography, or digital money.

So, the digital is not an abstraction but rather the creation of a plethora of quite concrete forms and processes. Furthermore, these are always encountered in the context of their use and consequences for some particular population, which means they become subject to cultural differentiation. The studies of social media referenced below reveal how the Chinese internet, where free instant messaging services such as QQ and WeChat focus upon avatars and hierarchies of users, is not the same as a Brazilian internet, with its emphasis upon political memes and gender relations. In one region we find an internet that constantly debates which digital forms are compatible with Islam, in another the concern will be on how the internet can be employed in mobilising feminist protests such as #MeToo, or how to prevent it from turning people into data which could be harvested. The development of coding allowed for new forms of sharing, not just of products, but also through what is termed ‘Open Source’; that is, the collaborative development of code itself. This has, in some regions, become a model for new political ideals (Kelty 2008). In Italy, the populist Five Star Movement, which advocates direct democracy through the internet, became in the 2018 election the largest political party in Italy. In turn, digital tools lead to new forms of surveillance and control that were previously unimaginable. Seen from an anthropological perspective, it is the diversity and contradictions of the internet that become prominent.

Digital anthropology therefore has to contend with the way culture itself has grown in scale and form, including new dreams and new nightmares about who we are becoming, and who or what should be regarded as modern or traditional. For the anthropologist, the digital is always approached in context. If biometrics in India seem to provide better access to welfare benefits, or in China to new forms of citizen control, this is because of political choices as to how they will be used. What biometrics as a whole represents is simply the increasing capacities of vast data banks sourced from people that can then be exploited in numerous ways.

Some newish worlds

The term ‘newish’, rather than new, is important here, since there is no clear divide between unprecedented worlds developed through digital technologies and the gradual transformation of the rest of life as they are impacted by these same technologies. Indeed one of the main trajectories in the development of digital anthropology has been through the previously established anthropology of media. This is a field in which we can all easily follow the gradual transformation of media into a largely digital form. Most of us will now watch what we still call television, but may be increasingly encountered through a variety of screens, including our phones. We can see how newspapers are being challenged by other forms of news dissemination, which brings ambiguity and precarity to those who would call themselves journalists. All of this has led to a corresponding shift in the anthropology of media (Pertierra 2017). While there is no absolute or clear division, it may still be worth drawing a contrast between ‘newish’ worlds, which largely could not have existed but for the development of digital technologies, as against the study of the use and consequences of digital technologies by ordinary people.

Digital technologies have given rise to a wide assortment of new populations that may at first appear quite alien. One role of the anthropologist has been to empathetically engage with those populations in order to help us understand both what they do and how to understand the world from their perspective. A pioneer of such work has been Gabriella Coleman (2012, 2014) through her long-term engagements first with hackers and then groups such as Anonymous who have come to occupy political or alternative niches that have been enabled by these new technologies. Her work helps shift our understanding of these groups from mere caricature to having a sense of their own internal debates over how they should or should not intervene politically. In a similar vein, Jenna Burrell (2012) worked with West Africans who became scammers. She was able to balance the focus upon the victims they had fleeced with the conditions of exclusion and poverty that often characterised the situation of the perpetrators of such actions and help us see the world from their point of view.

These hackers and scammers exploit niches created by new digital technologies without which they would not exist. More commonly, digital developments extend trends and possibilities that were already present; for example, through changing the infrastructure behind labour markets. In this instance the new technologies are thought to extend still further a long trajectory by which human agency is suppressed by the increasing sophistication of machines and powerful interests, generally understood as neo-liberal capitalism. An early debate about how digital technologies had extended transnational labour was over whether there was a practice of ‘gold farming’ where Chinese workers intensively played computer games to win treasures that were then sold on to less assiduous game players in other countries (Nardi & Kow 2010). More recently we have witnessed the rise of what is now called the ‘gig’ economy, digital technologies, such as smartphone apps, have blurred the boundaries and responsibilities of companies in relation to workers. Ilana Gershon (2017) examined the implications of the career-focused online network LinkedIn as a site where workers now have to perform particular appearances and claims in order to obtain work. She uses this example to show how digital platforms can turn neo-liberal political philosophies not just into new forms of work, but also new ways in which we visualise and understand ourselves as individuals as we craft the way we present ourselves to the world within the dictates of this platform.

Digital technologies have also drastically transformed the time and space of working practices. For example, a vast business complex near Chennai in South India has three periods of rush hour as call centre workers come in to serve markets in Asia, Europe, and North America, respectively (Ventkatraman 2017). There are also digital nomads who can carry out their paid work from almost anywhere. Digital technologies have caused the collapse of many traditional businesses and ways of working. Perhaps the most forceful example of how an anthropologist can convey the way human beings may become, in effect, an extension of the digital machine has been Natasha Schüll’s (2012) careful dissection of the new mechanisms that have transformed slot machines in Las Vegas through increasingly perfected technologies whose sole purpose is keeping people addicted to gambling. Not all these studies focus on the furtherance of oppressive forces. Thomas Malaby (2009), for example, in contrast to Schüll, examines the role of contingency and liberal fantasies that may emerge in the construction of game platforms, using the example of Linden Lab in creating Second Life.

Given their more holistic methods and perspectives, anthropologists are more likely than those in the media or political studies to present digital developments as contradictory. For example, rather than merely dismissing the rise of social media as against more traditional forms of news reporting, they are more likely to investigate particular examples of the use of social media for the dissemination of information (e.g. Chua 2018). Music reveals a constantly changing dynamic, including decommodification (e.g. Spotify), new modes of collaboration for musicians (see, for example, Haworth & Born 2016), and ways they interact with the public (e.g. MySpace).

Another way anthropologists have engaged with these newish worlds is by focusing upon specific digital platforms and their usages. An example is Patricia Lange’s (2014) work on how young people create material for YouTube. There is also Michael Wesch’s influential visual presentation An Anthropological Introduction to YouTube. Jamie Coates (2017) provides an anthropological perspective on the phenomenon of images and ideas going ‘viral’, as in the cases of the rapid spread of memes. Other media may themselves become the vehicles for the rapid acceptance of assumptions about how, for example, we are supposed to be prone to fake news or to live within political echo chambers where we only hear similar views to our own. By contrast, ethnographic work provides a much more nuanced sense of what people actually believe and why. This is partly because other disciplines mostly depend upon analysis based only on publicly available data such as Twitter, while ethnographers gain access to more private and often more consequential and intimate discussion on, for example, WhatsApp.

Communication media represent an arena where it is generally accepted that the digital has almost entirely transformed the landscape. But anthropologists have recognised equally significant transformations in many other fields; for example, that of money. The impact is vast. We can focus on the way finance capitalism exploded into greater fields of scale and abstraction following the technological developments which created the ‘big bang’ of 1986, and the further increasing use of digital technologies that lead to still greater volatility in capital markets that contributed to the 2008 collapse of those markets. At one end of this spectrum are the new abstractions of money represented by purely digital mechanisms, such as a ‘blockchain’, that can produce new currencies such as Bitcoin. At the other end is the way mobile-phone-based money systems such as M-Pesa have led to the enfranchisement of populations in Kenya and elsewhere who were previously excluded from banking and micro-finance. Here an exemplary anthropologist is Bill Maurer (2015) who has tried to consider the entire spectrum of these new forms of money and payment and their often contradictory consequences. Maurer argues that rather than seeing these consequences in isolation, we should come to regard different forms of money more as a repertoire or scale, which in turn reflects the scales of sociality that have been uncovered in studies of social media.

This section began with examples that are relatively autonomous, being created entirely by digital technologies. But we have gradually shifted to newish worlds of digital media and digital money that are more hybrid extensions to prior forms. By this criteria, most of the infrastructure of our contemporary world is newish. Does the vision of Open Source provide for new models of urban development, since, as with Wikipedia, it has demonstrated the viability of a much more democratic and open politics of creation (Jiménez 2014)? It is hard to imagine design today outside of digitization (Gunn, Otto & Smith 2013), while our sense of place has been transformed by new locational technologies such as GPS, Google Earth and mobile phones. Are digital forms challenging and extending the traditional relationship between museums, art galleries, and objects (Geismar 2018)? What about the enablement of new forms of transport such as driverless cars, new capacities in digital design, or 3D manufacture? These are just some of the fields in which digital technologies have proved transformational (Horst & Miller 2012).

Everyday digital life

The previous section examined groups that exist entirely as a result of digital developments and the wider impact of the digital upon the forms and infrastructures within which we live. By contrast, there is another clear responsibility for digital anthropology to observe and account for the consequences of all these developments upon the everyday lives of ordinary people around the world. This brings us back to a core component of anthropology: traditional holistic ethnography, in which we try to understand how people relate to everything that bears upon their lives. Nobody lives just online, so to understand their involvement with digital technologies we continue to focus on the wider context of their non-digital lives. Since these are general ethnographies of populations, the emphasis will also be on those forms of digital culture that have become more ubiquitous, such as social media and smartphones.

One of the key contributions of anthropology is to counter the constant claims made about the impact of digital technologies that come from more universalising disciplines such as psychology and internet studies. Because their model is the natural sciences, they may experiment with a proximate population, such as US college students, and then extrapolate their results more broadly. We are then told that new digital media has an impact upon attention span and possibly our brains, or that young people are confused as to what a real friend is. By contrast, anthropologists are committed to an inclusive understanding of the modern world that recognises that we need to be equally aware of populations in Africa, East and South Asia, and Latin America, and to be wary of generalizations that are not based on in-depth comparative studies.

What, for example, is the impact of digital communication technologies on Filipino women who migrate to care for children and the elderly across many regions? An appraisal may include studies of how the populations that remain within the Philippines use social networking platforms such as Friendster and, more recently, Facebook, to keep in touch with those who have gone abroad, but also how this now-global population of migrant workers use new media to retain a sense of Filipino sociality that can mitigate the separation of physical location by creating a more integrated online sphere (McKay 2016: 51-69). Many of these migrants are mothers who left behind their children to be brought up in the Philippines. As the internet replaced letter writing, this radically transformed the communications between mothers and children, from exchanges that could take months to constant daily interaction. Mothers and their children often had quite different views as to what these changes meant for transnational motherhood (Madianou & Miller 2012).

Instead of making universal generalizations, anthropologists may also demonstrate that in some places new phenomena such as social media have had relatively limited impact. For example, in Southern Italy, a place with a flourishing public sphere of people meeting each other around the town squares, there was relatively limited interest in social media (Nicolescu 2016). At the other extreme are the extraordinary findings of Xinyuan Wang (2016) who lived for 15 months inside one of the new Chinese factories that, as a whole, employs some 250 million people who have migrated from rural areas into this industrial sector. Social media has, in effect, become the place in which they now live. Rather than using social media to reconnect with their rural villages as had been anticipated, they use it as a more effective migration into the world of modern urban China than the move to the factory itself. Apart from eating, working, and sleeping, and interacting relatively little with their fellow workers, it is social media such as QQ and WeChat where they spend their leisure time, cultivating a sense of themselves as fully part of modern China and its consumer culture: something that the migration to the factory in itself had failed to achieve. It is often the Chinese digital developments that have both more extensive platform capacities and deeper penetration into the lives of their users than platforms such as Facebook or Twitter.

In the study of digital technologies there is a tendency to focus upon the more unprecedented or spectacular consequences. But, as in the example of the Filipino diaspora, anthropologists will pay attention just as much to what might be considered the more conservative consequences of digital technologies - in that case, bringing families back together online that have been fragmented offline by global migration. In a similar fashion, Elisabetta Costa has shown how Kurdish people reconstruct their traditional lineage organization when the families themselves have become dispersed as a result of decades of conflict in Eastern Turkey (2016). The value of ethnography is demonstrated in that in all these cases we find an appreciation that online activity can only be understood relative to changes that have taken place offline.

The area that has perhaps received most attention is political anthropology, because digital technologies are often seen in popular discussion as the ‘cause’ of contemporary political transformations. Thus, there is currently intense interest in ideas such as whether Facebook is responsible for the rapid spread of hate speech, such as anti-Rohinga sentiments in Myanmar; whether the Trump presidency is partly a product of Twitter as a platform; or whether a company called Cambridge Analytica employed these technologies to alter the results of elections by carefully and secretly targeting voters. Once again, the role of anthropologists is to contest assertions that are made about these political impacts through more long term and contextual considerations. For example, John Postill (2008) questioned debates about digital political communities, because often these make simplistic assumptions about the prevalence of prior offline communities. If we ask, ‘is this online forum a real community?’ it makes it sound as through previously everyone lived in such real communities, when actually, as Postill notes, that may not have been the case at all.

Because the appraisal of new technologies is generally moralistic, there is a constant tendency to simplify and romanticise the pre-digital world. Going against this trend, anthropologists strive to provide much more specificity to these debates. Victoria Bernal, in her study of Eritrean diaspora politics, examines a series of websites which are best understood not as expressions of national public spheres in general, but rather the very specific circumstance of Eritrean politics: a military regime that created an often unpaid army on the basis of nationalist requirements for the survival of the new nation, but which in some cases became tantamount to slavery (Bernal 2014). Bernal’s focus is on the use of online spaces to create but also to skew debate within the diaspora as to how Eritrean people should respond.

Moreover, digital anthropology tends to investigate the ways people regard each other as acting appropriately or inappropriately. The study of Filipino mothers mentioned above, for example, showed that their engagement with digital media opened up new possibilities for moral judgement. Previously, people had chosen media mainly because of cost or access. The Philippines was one of the first regions to make intensive use of text messaging because it was free. Today, most people have phone plans or internet plans, so there is no cost implication behind which communication is selected. The result is that media has become more integrated into social and moral concerns. Nowadays, a person is judged by the fact that they dumped their boyfriend by WhatsApp instead of by phone (Gershon 2010). People in several different regions also avoid discussion of politics on social media because it is divisive and other people let them know this is the case.

Establishing a moral framework as to what constitutes appropriate behaviour online leads to the more general question: how is the normative established? Especially when, for online activity, this seems to develop within months or weeks, as in the use of new platforms such as Snapchat or Line.^[2]Each of these platforms grew through an emphasis on some particular trait, such as the ability for images to self-destruct after ten seconds, or to add a plethora of visual abstractions and animations, capacities which are often then copied by rivals and become taken for granted. So, an important part of digital anthropology is observing and accounting for the rapid manifestation of new normative principles involved in these new forms of communication. For example, the way phones are used to establish what can and cannot be talked about in the Congo or Mozambique (Archambault 2017, Pype 2016). Examining the use of social media worldwide, it became apparent that the meme has developed as just such a mechanism for establishing the normative. Even people with very limited literacy can easily share a meme that expresses their moral views about good or bad behaviour (Miller et al. 2016: 172-3).

There is also obvious depth gained by developing long-term fieldwork, as in the extended study of mobile phone technologies in a Bengali village (Tenhunen 2018), since normativity today is not so much established as it is continually changing along with the ever-changing technologies. Historically, anthropologists have assumed that the main force behind the normative was the depth of tradition: what people in many places refer to as their customs. Digital anthropology, dealing with rapid change, represents a striking contrast. As such, what does digital anthropology imply for what anthropology and indeed humanity is now becoming? This will be the subject of the final section.

How we do anthropology digitally

The study of digital anthropology has already gone through several iterations. An earlier review concentrated on the exploration of online communities (Wilson & Peterson 2002), while a later review focused more on the ethnographic approach to digital media (Coleman 2010). A more recent edited collection (Horst & Miller 2012) examined the variety of fields of study, ranging from location to politics to domestic life, as well as the implications for theory and anthropology more generally. It is hard, however, to separate this sequence from developments in methodology, which have also arisen in response to new possibilities created through digital technologies. For example, ethnography often consisted of researching and describing a bounded space and time, where exit from the field site meant the end of the anthropologist’s relationships with their informants. But, with social media, the people anthropologists work amongst expect to retain those relationships over distance and subsequent to the completion of the ethnography, which is consequently harder to delineate.

Many new sources of information are now online and anthropologists may replace their traditional notebooks with devices such as voice recording, cutting and pasting from digital sources, or shared files (Sanjek & Tratner 2015). With these new mechanisms for recording and analyzing information, digital ethnography needs to be considered alongside the ethnography of the digital (Pink et al. 2016). It may be useful to think about these changes as part of much wider methodological debates. For example, Sarah Pink had previously argued for more attention to be given to the senses or to visual media, parallel to still earlier influences from phenomenology that implied that experience is something that has to be viewed from the interaction between our bodies and our environments.

This critical assessment of digital ethnography is all the more important since other disciplines have increasingly embraced ethnography as a means of linking the study of new digital technologies with an assessment of their consequences for populations. For example, STS (Science and Technology Studies) has provided several insightful ethnographies of the use of digital technologies of care (Oudshoorn 2011; Pols 2012). These have the virtue of considering not just medics and patients but also new forms of labour, such as data processors, who are often one of the hidden consequences of such technologies. They thereby link equally well to studies in medical anthropology and digital anthropology.

Within the field of digital anthropology, there is a more specific focus upon virtual ethnography, where anthropologists study online worlds and encounters in addition to conventional field sites. The key exemplar of this approach was Tom Boellstorff’s ethnography of the online computer game Second Life, a study that retains many of the characteristics of traditional ethnography but applied to an entirely online world (Boellstorff 2008). He shows, for example, how many of the disputes over property ownership and between neighbours online echo those familiar from traditional offline contexts. Many examples can be found within what are often substantial gaming communities such as World of Warcraft (Nardi 2010). Several of the anthropologists involved have provided textbook examples on how to engage in such virtual world studies (Boellstorff et al. 2012), examining, for example, some of the difficult ethical issues of observing peoples’ behaviours who one might not otherwise know or be able to obtain consent from. Others have looked to use digital technology to find a balance between online and offline that reflect the lives of their informants. For example, they have studied migrants who have become dispersed worldwide but who try to re-integrate their families online (Landzelius 2006).

Digital technologies can also enhance anthropologists’ involvement in the dissemination of their research results. The Why we post project (Miller et al. 2016) created a spectrum of short, highly accessible forms such as YouTube films under five minutes, social media activity, blogging, and a free online university course (MOOC).^[3] By making anthropological work freely available online in the languages of our field sites, even traditional ethnographic monographs can become very popular indeed, with that particular project reaching half a million downloads by 2018. These developments in free access mean that anthropological research can be more easily returned back to the often low-income societies that tend to be the subject of much of our research. This is true also for popular online anthropological magazines such as Sapiens^[4] and journals such as Cultural Anthropology.^[5]

Changing humanity

The first two sections represent a contrast. One dealt with relatively new worlds created through the digital, and the other with the more general consequences for peoples whose lives are not especially digitally inflected. The distinction was important partly because they are likely to lead to different conclusions. For example, currently one of the major developing interests within digital anthropology concerns the potential impact of the collection of vast amounts of data, their use in the construction of algorithms, and more generally the massive investments in artificial intelligence (e.g. Kockelman 2013). An example of one anthropological response to these interests is Minna Ruckenstein and Natasha Schüll’s (2016) survey of the ‘datafication’ of health. The emphasis is mostly negative. Data is regarded as at least analogous to the tradition role of capital, creating the conditions for more targeted commodification and new forms of power. Datafication gives unprecedented capacities for surveillance and control which not only predict, but also shape and modify human behaviour. There is also a sense of dehumanization where people come to see themselves more as visualizations of data, rather than simply as persons. Furthermore, these technologies reinforce given differences in gender and other unequal social parameters. As in the previous examples of digitally created worlds, the main emphasis is on groups that have been constructed around these new possibilities, such as people who identify with the Quantified Self movement^[6]and engage in various forms of self-tracking. An alternative focus is the active refusal of such technologies which may now be seen as a form of resistance.

By contrast, the studies discussed under the title of everyday digital life concern populations that either do not particularly embrace or refuse digital technologies, but rather simply accept them rapidly as normative within their daily life. Mostly people engage with the latest digital technologies as smartphone apps. For them, artificial intelligence and algorithms are experienced as, for example, more effective instant foreign language translation services, more effective GPS navigation, or more accurate voice dictation. Far from dehumanising, they see their phone as increasingly aligned with their particular personality and tend to feel bereft if by chance they have accidently left their digital companion at home. They are far more concerned with surveillance by their families than that by companies. With regard to health issues, they are more likely to welcome the degree to which the inside of their own bodies, which previously were largely unknown to them except when they erupted in disease, are now knowable as data. They may pay attention to apps that count their steps, or predict their menstrual periods, and use these for developing healthier or more planned lifestyles.

So, where does all this leave digital anthropology? Modern holistic digital anthropology should strive to combine the best of both these approaches. Ethnography may be employed in the direct study of corporations and states, and alert us to data gathering and subsequent usage. Studies of ordinary populations ensure that we are able to appraise the consequences of artificial intelligence and algorithms through studies of what people actually do on a regular basis with the apps that employ them. Those that focus upon digital practitioners help us appreciate the wider infrastructure of states and corporations and the potential for more malign consequences. The first conclusion is therefore that we need both kinds of research and both sides of these arguments: an attention to vast forces that may be oppressive, and the equal commitment to intimate and empathetic engagement with ordinary people that respects their views and experiences as authentic. The second conclusion is that the anthropological commitment is based on long-term scholarship, which may include the study of moralistic debates around these issues but as a way to understand them and account for them, rather than simply to affirm the anthropologists’ own ideological stance. Thirdly, anthropology should be the discipline that encompasses contradiction and recognises that in almost every instance, the new digital technologies raise new possibilities for both benign and malign consequences, which are usually two sides of the same coin.

Even prior to the rise of digital technologies, anthropologists such as Donna Haraway and Marilyn Strathern had raised profound questions about how other developments, such as those in reproductive technologies, impact upon questions of what it now means to be human. As noted above, one major concern has been with the potentially dehumanising effect of new digital technologies such as artificial intelligence. The anthropomorphism represented by the science fiction robot is now finally coming into being. In Japan, where there is a very high proportion of elderly people, a key interest has been in the development of robots that can then take ‘care’ of the elderly, incidentally potentially replacing those Filipina caregivers discussed above (Wright 2018). Similarly, the smartphone was referred to earlier as a digital companion: a phone looks much less like a person than a robot, but it may already show still greater scope for a more subtle anthropomorphism. On the one hand, corporations develop artificial intelligence, algorithms, and chatbots and provide digital assistants with names such as Siri and Alexa, which suggests this anthropomorphism is coming from digital innovation. But at the same time, the owner of a smartphone may ignore the built-in apps, and may instead download others, which they then reconfigure so that their phone is anthropomorphic by way of expressing their particular personality: as a highly organised administrator, a creative artist, or a rugged male who can claim all his usage of the phone is based on necessity.

All of the above suggests that perhaps the real problem here lies with the very term ‘humanity’. Could this be too conservative, since conventionally it refers to everything humanity has been up to now, but not all those things humanity may in time become (Miller & Sinanan 2014: 15-20)? Humanity might once have been defined as beings that could not fly, but then came the aeroplane. Instead of using terms such as post-human or trans-human, we might want to define humanity as including a latency that is achieved by each new technology. The concluding point is that digital anthropology, which can include the study of both use and consequence, is thereby as much a study of what people are becoming as what technologies are becoming. We now face an extreme contrast between anthropology’s initial interest in custom and tradition, compared to the speed of contemporary developments. At the same time, these may be just as expressive of persistent anthropological concerns, such as the nature of normativity. Furthermore, the speed of change makes a still stronger case for the role of long-term ethnographic studies that are prepared to encompass the complexity and contradictions that are intrinsic to an assessment of our new digital worlds. It seems reasonable therefore to also use digital anthropology to engage in debates about both what humanity is becoming and what anthropology is becoming.

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Note on contributor

Daniel Miller is Professor of Anthropology at the Department of Anthropology, University College London. He is author/editor of thirty-nine books mainly concerned with the study of material culture, consumption, and digital anthropology. He has conducted fieldwork in India, Ireland, Philippines, Solomon Islands, Trinidad, and the United Kingdom.

Professor Daniel Miller, UCL Anthropology, University College London, 14 Taviton Street, London WC1H 0BW, United Kingdom. d.miller@ucl.ac.uk. @DannyAnth.

[1] These are systems that both provide and then act upon positive and negative feedback.

[2] Snapchat is a picture-based messaging service. Line is another messaging service that strongly emphasises visual content.

[3] Why we post: social media through the eyes of the world. University College London (available on-line: https://www.ucl.ac.uk/why-we-post?utm_source=UCL%20Press&utm_medium=UCL%20Press&utm_campaign=UCL%20Press).

[4] SAPIENS. The Wenner-Gren Foundation (available on-line: www.sapiens.org).

[5] Cultural Anthropology. The Society for Cultural Anthropology. American Anthropological Association (available on-line: www.culanth.org).

[6] The Quantified Self movement consists of people who focus upon the way their bodies and behaviours are increasingly visible as externalised and quantified data.